SCCD- A Social Capital Driven Career Development Framework

Sociological theories of career success provide fundamental
principles for the analysis of social links to identify
patterns that facilitate career development. Burt’s Structural
Hole Theory has argued that certain network structures provide
career advantage to individuals by facilitating them to access
unique information and connecting them with a diverse range
of others in different social cliques. The benefits of structural
advantages of one’s network have been studied extensively in
online social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. However,
they have not been studied enough in workplace settings for
employee career development in the presence of both formal
company’s hierarchical network and informal enterprise social
network. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing
a Social Capital-driven Career Development framework which
leverages enterprise social networks, employee collaboration
activity streams and the organizational chart to assess employee’s
social capital across organizational hierarchy levels. We further
demonstrate that our framework can enable an employees to reflect
on his/her social networking behavior from the collaboration
activities and improve on weak aspects for progressing from one
hierarchy level to the immediate next level in their respective
business units.