Work Where You Can Build Capital

Look for places where you can build capital, knowledge, experience, and skills in yourself

Experience capital determines future productivity and future income

We are surrounded by social capital: countries where capital has been accumulated, cities where capital has been accumulated, and even companies where capital has been accumulated. In this environment of capital, what efforts should individuals make? They need to manage their personal assets carefully, from choosing schools with strong accumulated capital even before entering university to seeking out companies with accumulated capital after graduation.

If you start at a good company in a country where capital has been accumulated, you can receive far better treatment than if you start somewhere that lacks it. There is a difference from the very beginning between working for a company in Mongolia, where capital accumulation is weak, and working for a solid large Korean conglomerate.

But working at a large company is not always ideal. If you only do simple tasks in a highly specialized division-of-labor environment, you cannot build experience. If you only carry out assigned duties or repetitive work, you may learn nothing even after 10 or 20 years. Even if the pay is high, if you cannot build capital that benefits you, you should think carefully about whether to stay in that job. Simply having worked for a large company does not guarantee your future after retirement.

Even a stable job with guaranteed retirement can become harmful. Government jobs are highly preferred, but work in simple fields is not helpful. No matter what, around age 60 you will have to leave your job, and if you retire after doing only simple work your whole life, there is no way you will remain competitive. In an era of 100-year lifespans, you need to diligently build experience while you are employed in order to stay competitive after retirement.

To prepare for life after retirement by building experience and social adaptability, it may in some cases be better to work in a small business or in the venture business sector. If experience capital accumulates through doing a variety of work, your market value can become higher in the long run. While you are employed, you need to build experience as capital and constantly think about how to use that capital.

There is nothing better than gaining diverse experience at a large company where highly skilled capital has been accumulated. People who worked capably at large companies may, after retirement, be recruited by other firms to transfer their skills. That is because there are developing countries that adopt technologies long used in Korea only at a much later stage.

If you only performed simple tasks at a large company, it will be difficult to gain the opportunity for a second life in another country. Even in a small or medium-sized enterprise, if you learned new technologies and built experience capital, you can begin a new life after retirement as much as you like. That is why, whether it is a large company or an SME, you should look for places where you can build experience capital. Rather than choosing places that simply pay well now or seem stable, you should, from a long-term perspective, look for places where you can build capital, knowledge, experience, and skills in yourself.

Your future can change depending on what kinds of skills and experience you build in yourself. That is why you should seek not a “job for life,” but “work you can do for life.” How will you use the experience capital you have built to carve out your future? You must always keep that in mind. Experience capital determines future productivity and future income.

What matters is whether you do work others cannot do and whether you can replace others. If you gain experience others do not have and create value from that experience, your market value will naturally rise.

A stable job and guaranteed retirement mean little. What matters is building valuable experience capital while working within an organization. The various experiences you accumulate in working life—management-related skills and know-how, organizational management capabilities, and more—become capital for the future. You must always strive to develop capabilities that you can put to use later.

Sung-no Choi

Ph.D. in Economics, Korea University Graduate School; President of the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE); President of the Korea Christian Economics Association. Grand Prize in the Publishing Category at the 25th Market Economy Awards. Author of Born Again as an Entrepreneur, Getting Rich with Financial Knowledge, What Is the Market Economy?, and many others.

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Original title: 자본을 축적할 수 있는 곳에서 일하라

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2024-04-01

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=2&idx=26944