Career success and career capital are cointegrated
Career success and career capital can diverge periodically but will over the medium to long-run converge. In that sense they are cointegrated – they exist in long-run equilibrium with one another. My personal belief is that career success is the mean reverting part of the system. That is – career success way above or below earned career capital will be transitory. If you get a lucky stream of “success shocks”, you’ll eventually fall back down to your actual level of career capital. Same in the reverse.
That said, my sense is that these deviations are somewhat persistent. I don’t have a strong sense of the exact autoregressive coefficient nor the error correction coefficient, but I don’t think this stuff dissipates within a year. It probably takes at least one job turn, which is 2+ years for most white collar professionals.
Note that in isolation both career success and career capital will appear to be highly persistent random walks, but as in @lettauConsumptionAggregateWealth the true driver the permanent changes can be found via cointegration analysis.