Building career capital: developing business leaders’ career mobility

Career theorists have been increasingly occupied with role transitions across organisations, neglecting role transitions undertaken within single organisations. By exploring in depth the aspects of career capital that role holders need to facilitate their own organisational role transition, this article builds upon career capital theory. Adopting an interpretivist approach, this study explores the experiences of 36 business leaders who have undertaken a recent role transition within a United Kingdom (UK) construction business. The article empirically characterises 24 career capital aspects, clustered into Knowing Self, Knowing How and Knowing Whom. It argues that these aspects are important to internal role transitions and compares them to mainstream career capital theory. In addition, the concepts of connecting, crossing and investing career capital are introduced to explain how career capital supports such transitions. This study proposes a new career capital framework and refocuses debate on organisational careers. It is based on a single organisation, and it organisations. The article explores the implications of the new career capital framework for business leaders and organisational managers who wish to build individual and organisational career mobility. This study proposes a new, empirically-grounded, career capital theoretical framework particularly attending to organisational role transitions.