Understanding how social capital leads to human capital is essential to appreciating the ways people gain the knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve career success and independence. Individuals are embedded in a network of social and interpersonal relations who possess teachable competencies that aid development. Social capital has been established as improving academic achievement (Sacerdote, 2001), labor market outcomes (Lin 1999), innovation, chances of promotion within organizations (Podolny and Baron, 1997), and upward mobility (Brand and Xie, 2010).
But, how exactly can we foster social capital? We will discuss the use of social capital in the Brightsity platform and its applications with thousands of doctors, nurses, employees, managers, business leaders, undergraduate, and graduate students across racial, sex, ethnic, generational, religious and ideological groups. We have been able to demonstrate statistically significantly increased psychometric outcomes, such as Leadership, Service Orientation, Compassion for others, mindfulness, and other interpersonal skills that are critical for organizations (recruitment, selection, performance measurement) and accreditation purposes. Critically, the platform has significantly diminished stress, anxiety, and depression (which cause huge productivity losses) and is exceptionally easy for coaches, psychologist, social workers, professors, training managers to use for self-development and the development of their clients.