By Ethan Lyon, Senior Writer
What is the measure of your influence? What professional or personal milestones contribute to your personal value? A doctorate or 30 years of marketing experience? It’s milestones like these that measure our human capital. Human capital is the investment and development of skills and education to increase your professional value. It is the sum of talents, education and experience that determine your personal influence:
Talent — We are not inherently a Wolfgang Puck, or a John Lennon or Barack Obama. Each of us is born with different talents that make us unique and valuable to society. Though the 10,000 hour rule is the standard threshold for mastering a skill, it doesn’t mean we are or will be an historical figure.
Education – As we’ve illustrated, accomplishing academic milestones builds human capital. For example, an MBA from traditional schools not from accredited online MBA programs can command a higher salary than an BA or a degree from Harvard carries more clout than a degree from a state school.
Experience — Experience exemplifies your real-world savvy. However, not all experience has the same value. Twenty years as an assembly worker is less valued than twenty years climbing the corporate ladder.
Human capital has been examined extensively in the real-world setting. What are the implications of human capital in the digital space? Using the key elements to analyze human capital offline, we can explore human capital on the web. Let’s begin with a simple questions: What individual value do you lend to the online community?
Talent — There are a lot of successful people in the publishing world. Not all are influencers online. Seth Godin is, however. His ability to pull interesting and fun marketing concepts from everyday products has made him an industry guru. His talent for spotting marketing shifts has made him a go-to for an ahead-of-the-curve perspective.
Education — Glenn Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. His professional life does spill into his personal life, however. Reynolds is the founder of the influential blog, Instapundit. His education credentials serve as a backdrop for his online success. In essence, his offline human capital has translated into online human capital.
Experience – The Hard Knox Life is a branding blog by Dave Knox. If you were to do a scan of the hundreds of branding blogs, Dave Knox would stand above the crowd as he exerts tremendous influence offline in his position as Proctor & Gamble’s brand manager.
It is the culmination of these three elements of human capital that comprise individual influence in digital and offline settings. Though our examples illustrate each element of influence, Seth Godin and Dave Knox both have higher education and Glenn Reynolds has experience and talent. Influencers embody all elements of human capital–though they emphasize one element more than the others. If you take a look at the timeline of an influencer, it was their talent and passion that determined their field of study (though not as a rule), and from their education they changed their industry after they achieved all three elements. The story starts with passion and from there, you can grow influence. For those that do not follow their passions, they certainly will not find influence.
Image by dalia Drulia from Stock.Xchng
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