Employability Capital: Toward an Integrative Framework of Dimensions, Domains, and Temporality

Employability capital has become established as a construct for understanding the resources that individuals accumulate and mobilize to obtain, retain, and manage employment throughout their careers. However, the proliferation of personal resources associated with human, social, cultural, psychological, and identity capital has generated conceptual overlaps that make it difficult to delimit the construct, measure it, and accumulate theoretical knowledge. The purpose of this article is to characterize employability capital based on its dimensions, with the aim of establishing a future research agenda for the construct. Through an integrative conceptual analysis of the seminal and recent literature, the construct is delimited from related notions, and a three-dimensional framework is proposed. The results indicate that employability capital is organized along three axes: the forms of capital that constitute its resource base (human, social, cultural, identity, and psychological capital), which have already been addressed in the literature; the domains of application toward which these resources are mobilized (employment, career, and development); and its temporality (accumulation, interaction, and mobilization), in which agency operates as a transversal mechanism of activation rather than as a sixth dimension. The main contribution of this study lies in integrating these elements into an Employability Capital Framework (ECF), which explicitly articulates the relationships between the different forms of capital, their domains of application, and their temporal dynamics. It is concluded that the proposed framework organizes the field, distinguishes capital from its manifestations (perceptions and outcomes), guides its measurement, and provides a methodological, contextual, and theoretical research agenda for the study of the construct.