General vs. Specific Human Capital

General human capital consists of skills and knowledge portable across employers and contexts: communication, reasoning, the capacity to learn new domains quickly, the judgment that Edo Segal calls taste. Specific human capital consists of skills and knowledge valuable only within a particular firm, industry, or technological context: mastery of a proprietary codebase, expertise in a framework that may be superseded, deep familiarity with the authority structures and institutional knowledge of a specific organization. Becker demonstrated that specific capital commands a premium precisely because it is not portable. The firm values it because it cannot be replicated by hiring someone off the street. The worker values it because it represents a relationship — an accumulation of knowledge about this particular system, this team, this way of doing things — that took years to build and cannot be transferred.