Imprinted Human Capital: A Classificatory Framework for Developing Tabula Rasa Workers

Abstract

Individuals develop human capital through both experiences and education throughout their working careers. An implicit assumption in the human capital literature is that career development is relatively uniform and agnostic to timing of the individual’s experience or sequence of their experiences. However, not all individuals with similar functional backgrounds or tenures develop uniform human capital. We utilize an imprinting lens to theorize on different types of experiences, how the timing and strength of these experiences lead to differences in human capital and discuss primacy of different types of human capital. We develop a classificatory framework based on the timing and imprinting strength of different experiences and how they relate to human capital.