In Part 1, I told you about building career capital without knowing you’re doing it—the strange deposits that don’t show up on any statement but compound silently over decades.
In Part 2, we talked about luck favoring the depositors—how opportunity finds people who’ve been making those deposits, even when the deposits looked questionable at the time.
Now comes the hard part: knowing when you have enough to spend.
The Question Nobody Prepared Me For
When the Iowa State opportunity first surfaced in 2024, I didn’t immediately think, “Yes, I’m ready for this.”
I thought, “Do I have enough?”
Not enough credentials—I had those. Not enough experience—I’d been practicing, teaching, and leading for over two decades.
The question was: Do I have enough career capital to bet on myself at this level?
Because here’s what catches people off guard about midlife career moves: The stakes get higher. The visibility increases. The room for error shrinks. And the question isn’t whether you can do the work—it’s whether you’ve accumulated enough capital to absorb the risk and deliver when it matters.
I’d spent 25 years making deposits. Selling on eBay and Amazon while my colleagues questioned the choice. Building vet tech programs from nothing. Managing hospital operations. Learning to navigate academic bureaucracy without losing my mind or my integrity.
But deposits don’t automatically translate into spending power. You have to know what you’ve built, what it’s worth, and when you have enough to make your move.
What Your Scattered Path Actually Built
I spent two decades thinking my nonlinear career was evidence of indecision. Private practice, then teaching while still in practice, then academic program building, then hospital operations leadership—it looked scattered.
What I didn’t understand: I was learning to see systems from multiple angles. Every role added a lens. Every pivot built fluency in a new domain.
The e-commerce business I ran for 15 years alongside full-time veterinary work? That taught me inventory management, margin analysis, and how to run multiple operations simultaneously. Today, I’m managing supplies across 25+ clinical service lines using the exact same systems thinking.
The community college job that looked like a step backward? That taught me how to build something meaningful from nothing and deliver quality despite limited budgets. Today, I use those skills every week when someone tells me the answer is no but the work still needs to happen.
None of it felt like capital accumulation at the time. Most of it felt like scrambling.
But when Iowa State needed someone who could handle clinical operations, business management, academic bureaucracy, and entrepreneurial problem-solving all at once—I had an account full of exactly those deposits.
Not because I planned it. Because I’d been saying yes to uncomfortable things for 25 years.
Your scattered path isn’t a bug. It’s diversification. And diversification becomes valuable precisely when conditions change—which they always do.
The Five Forms of Capital You’re Already Building
Career capital isn’t one thing. It’s at least five different currencies, and you need to know your balance in each.
1. Skill Capital
The most valuable skills at midlife aren’t listed in job descriptions. They’re meta-skills: learning how to learn, translating across professional languages, managing complexity without complete information, leading through ambiguity, making decisions when both options look bad.
These aren’t acquired in courses. They’re built through uncomfortable experience—the project that went sideways, the reorganization that forced you to rebuild relationships from scratch, the budget cut that made you choose between bad options and worse ones.
Audit question: Can you articulate, in two clear sentences, what you do better than most people? Not “I’m a hard worker” or “I’m passionate.” Can you name the specific capability you’ve built that’s unusual or hard to replicate?
If you can’t do this, you’re not ready to spend boldly. You’re still accumulating.
2. Network Capital
Your network isn’t just who you know. It’s who thinks of you when opportunity opens up. Most career transitions at midlife come through what researchers call “weak ties”—not your closest colleagues, but people who know you well enough to remember you when something surfaces.
But those relationships only pay out if you’ve been making deposits all along. Showing up when you don’t have to. The coffee with a former colleague that goes nowhere professionally. The introduction you make with no immediate benefit. The advice you give that costs you time but earns you nothing measurable.
Your network is infrastructure. You don’t build infrastructure in a crisis—you maintain it during peacetime so it’s there when the ground shifts.
3. Reputation Capital
In my experience across hiring committees and leadership roles at multiple institutions, I’ve consistently seen organizations value leadership and social influence over narrow technical expertise—even for roles that seem purely technical. But reputation isn’t a marketing problem—it’s a consistency problem.
Your reputation is what people say about your character when you’re not in the room. It’s built one decision at a time, over years, in moments when nobody’s watching. It can’t be gamed, shortcut, or faked for long. It’s the compounding interest on integrity.
Every time you deliver what you promised, own a mistake, or choose the harder right—deposit. Every time you cut a corner, blame someone else, or choose expediency—withdrawal.
Audit question: Would people bet on you with their own reputation at stake? When someone needs a complex problem solved and failure isn’t an option, does your name come up?
4. Financial Capital
This one’s unglamorous but critical: you need actual money to make bold career moves. Not “wealthy.” Just enough margin to make strategic decisions instead of desperate ones.
If you’re three months from financial crisis, you don’t have enough capital to spend boldly. You’re operating from scarcity, and scarcity makes bad deals look good.
I took a significant pay cut when I left private practice for community college teaching. I could afford to do that because I’d been making financial deposits through concurrent ventures, smart debt management, and living below my means.
Those deposits bought me the freedom to make a career move that looked financially questionable but turned out to be strategically brilliant.
5. Story Capital
Your messy, nonlinear career trajectory isn’t a liability. It’s a differentiated asset—if you know how to frame it.
Career storytelling isn’t about making your path look linear. It’s not, and everybody knows it’s not, and pretending otherwise just makes you look disconnected from reality. It’s about making the pattern visible. Every role, every detour—they connect if you can articulate the through-line.
Not the job titles. The capabilities you built. The problems you learned to solve. The perspective you gained that nobody else has.
When I talk about my career, I don’t list positions. I talk about learning to see veterinary medicine from every angle—clinician, owner, educator, administrator. I talk about building programs from scratch and leading through change. I talk about financial literacy learned by necessity and leadership earned through repetition, not title.
That narrative makes my capital spendable. Without it, my résumé looks scattered. With it, it looks strategic.
When You Have Enough to Make Your Move
Here’s how you know when you’re ready:
- Your value proposition is clear. You can explain, in two sentences, what you do better than most people and why that matters.
- Your network validates your move. When you test your idea with people who know your work, they don’t just encourage you—they offer to help, make introductions, or tell you what’s realistic.
- You’ve de-risked the transition. You’ve taken on side projects or advisory roles that test your hypothesis. In every successful midlife transition I’ve witnessed—both my own and those of colleagues—the pattern is consistent: warm experiments that became full-time commitments, not cold leaps into the unknown.
- You have financial runway. You have enough margin to make a strategic move without desperation driving your decisions.
- Your reputation precedes you. People in your target space already know your name, your work, or someone who’ll vouch for you.
When I moved from private practice to academia, I had capital. When I moved from community college to Purdue, I had more. When I stepped into hospital operations leadership at Iowa State, I believed I had enough.
Each move required spending capital I’d accumulated over years. And each move was only possible because I knew—not hoped, but knew—the deposits were there.
The Risk You Can’t Ignore: You Can Go Broke
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can overspend your career capital and wake up with nothing left.
Career capital isn’t infinite. You can bankrupt yourself by making a bold move before you’ve built enough, negotiating too hard and burning relationships, or spending your reputation on a bad bet. And the recovery takes years.
The way to avoid this: spend conservatively until you’re certain, then spend boldly.
Test assumptions with small experiments. Maintain relationships even when you don’t need them. Build your reputation by delivering, not by promising.
And when you do spend—when you make the pivot, take the promotion, launch the thing—commit fully. Half-spending career capital is worse than not spending at all. You lose the optionality without gaining the outcome.
What You’re Sitting On Right Now
Many professionals at midlife are sitting on more capital than they realize, but they’re discounting it because it doesn’t fit someone else’s template.
The hybrid of clinical work and teaching. The decade spent managing a business while working full-time. The relationships built in a field you left ten years ago. The skills learned from side hustles that seemed like distractions.
That’s not scattered. That’s diversified.
In Part 1, I told you about the deposits you’re making without knowing it. In Part 2, I told you how luck finds the depositors. Now I’m telling you:
You probably have more than you think. The question is whether you’re willing to claim it.
Can you name what you’re worth in the marketplace? Can you articulate the value proposition nobody else can match? Can you tell the story that makes your path make sense?
Because career capital only works if you’re willing to treat it like the asset it is. Not something you stumbled into. Not something you got lucky with. Something you built—deliberately or accidentally—through decades of showing up and doing the work.
When the Right Opportunity Comes
You’ll know you’re ready when opportunity shows up and you don’t immediately think, “Can I do this?”
You think: “I’ve been preparing for this for 25 years. I know exactly what I’m worth. And I’m betting I have enough to spend.”
That’s not arrogance. That’s clarity earned through accumulation.
So here’s my question for you:
What capital are you sitting on that you’ve been discounting because it doesn’t fit someone else’s template?
The side hustle that doesn’t make sense to your colleagues. The odd skills that don’t fit neatly into a job description. The nonlinear trajectory that makes your LinkedIn profile look like three different people wrote it. The relationships that don’t make sense on paper but keep paying dividends anyway. The reputation you’ve built quietly over decades.
That’s not noise. That’s signal. That’s not confusion. That’s diversification. That’s your competitive advantage.
And when the right opportunity comes—not the perfect one, but the right one—you’ll know whether you have enough to spend.
Many people do. They just don’t realize it yet.
Shape
This is Part 3 in the Career Capital series.
Read Part 1 | Read Part 2