Capability Portfolios: Your Real Resume Is Everything You Can Do

Hello! 👋 

It’s Thursday, 24^th July 2025. Welcome back to Bold Efforts, the Thursday letter about the future of work and living. Each week we look beneath headlines to find the forces reshaping how we earn, build, and thrive. My hope is simple: arm you with one idea that makes you act a little sooner and think a little bigger.

Careers are no longer straight lines. They zig, they loop, they sometimes stall and then leap. Yet most of us still try to prove our worth with a static resume. That document lists jobs in neat order, but it hides the best evidence: the mix of skills, mind‑sets, and outcomes that make you valuable right now. Today we explore the idea of the capability portfolios i.e. the living proof of everything you can do and why it is replacing the traditional resume.

First time reading? Join over 400 intellectually curious readers. Sign up here. As always, send me feedback at [email protected].

Key Idea: Capability Portfolios

The first known resume was a letter Leonardo da Vinci wrote to the Duke of Milan in 1482, listing the ways he could strengthen the city's defenses. In the 1950s the document became a standard corporate filter, printed on cream paper and judged by typeface. By the 1990s hiring software turned it into rows of keywords. Through every version one thing stayed constant: the resume assumed that value marched forward in a straight line of titles. That assumption is now broken.

Projects are shorter, industries collide, and skills expire in months. LinkedIn shows people switch sectors 2.5 times more often than they did a decade ago, while average time in a role has dropped below 30 months. A static document cannot keep up. What matters today is a live record of capabilities that travels with you and grows every time you ship real work. I call this record your capability portfolio.

What is a capability portfolio?

Picture an investment fund. It mixes assets that move on different cycles so the whole stays strong. Your portfolio mixes abilities: technical skills, social fluency, domain insight, creative habits, visible achievements, reputational signals. Together they protect you from shocks and open new doors.

We call this this hiring for capability stacks. Employers care less about where you learned a skill and more about whether you can blend skills to solve urgent problems. A software engineer who talks to customers, mentors juniors, and negotiates APIs spares a company three separate hires. A marketer who edits video and runs SQL queries shortens the path from idea to launch. The portfolio view shines a light on such compound value.

How to build your portfolio

• Audit. List the projects that stretched you during the past two years. For each one capture the hardest thing you did, the tool you mastered, and the impact in numbers.

• Publish. Put proof where strangers can see and verify it: a GitHub repo, a short Loom walkthrough, a customer quote, a Notion page that links them all.

• Rebalance. Retire tools that fade and add the ones rising. If AI threatens part of your stack, layer on prompt design, model evaluation, or data stewardship.

• Narrate. Tie the assets together with a clear line. Instead of reciting roles say, "I turn messy data into products people pay for." The story helps listeners connect the dots.

Why it matters now

Work moves faster than ever. A new tool can appear on Monday and dominate a workflow by Friday. Employers want people who learn on the fly and deliver under uncertainty. Capability portfolios surface that quality. They also widen the gate for talent outside traditional pipelines. A (vibe) coder in Almaty with shipped plugins can outshine an Ivy League graduate who has never built beyond class projects.

For leaders this lens changes team design. You stop filling boxes and instead assemble overlapping portfolios that reinforce each other. You hire a designer who writes copy, a data scientist who mentors interns, a recruiter who codes small automations. The team's collective capability beats any single line on a resume.

The so what

If your resume is a snapshot, your capability portfolio is a live stream. Keep it rolling. Show fresh scenes, update the cast, and highlight the plot twists that reveal what you can really do. When chance knocks you will not scramble to prove yourself. You will simply point to the record. Thank you for reading. See you next Thursday.

Best,
Kartik

Enjoying the read? Stay ahead with unique insights on the future of work and living. Subscribe to the Bold Efforts newsletter and receive fresh stories and ideas straight to your inbox every Thursday.

Who am I?
I’m Kartik, founder of Polynomial Studio, a holding company and product studio building AI-driven businesses for the future of work. The way we work and live is being rewritten. AI, remote work, and shifting economic forces are reshaping careers, businesses, and entire industries. The big question is where it’s all heading.

For the past eight years, I’ve been at the forefront of these shifts, working across real estate, technology, startups, and corporate strategy. I’ve helped businesses navigate change and stay ahead of what’s next, always focused on understanding the forces shaping our future and how we can use them to build something better. Click here to know more about me.

Why Bold Efforts?
I started Bold Efforts because I believe work should fit into life, not the other way around. Too many people are stuck in outdated systems that don’t serve them. This newsletter is about challenging the status quo and making the effort to design work around life. It brings together bold ideas and actionable insights to help you build a healthier, more balanced relationship with work, leading to greater purpose and fulfillment. If you’re looking for fresh perspectives on how to work and live better, you’re in the right place.

Was this email/link forwarded to you? Subscribe here