45-945 Leveraging Intellectual Capital, Star Performance, and Your Career
6 units, Carnegie Mellon University
This course is about designing your lives and careers within the context of the intellectual economy and work-world in which we all participate. The goal is to help you better understand that context and what you bring to it to be successful. We will explore the macro view of our growing intellectual capital economy and the micro view of your own intellectual capital. We will learn about what separates stars from average performers and how you can become a star, if you so choose. A major premise of the course is that the intellectual capital economy offers unique career opportunities and that gold collar workers (people whose value to the marketplace is their brainpower) need to think in non-traditional ways about how they leverage those opportunities over the course of their careers. As time and class interest permits, the course will include current career topics such as the Great Resignation, remote work, life-work balance, and the effect of technology on thinking, performance, and productivity. This course involves a high degree of personal self-exploration, as well as a mutual sharing of those explorations with your classmates. You learn and help each other design your own paths to being successful. By extension, you also learn how to develop future colleagues and subordinates to become star performers.
Prerequisites: none listed
Offered: Fall 2026, Fall 2025
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