The article provides an overview of the work of the sociological section “Human Capital and the Social Space of Labor: Opportunities and Innovations”, which took place within the framework of the International conference “Human Capital: Education, Labor, Employment in Modern Society”, dedicated to the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg State University, which was held under the auspices of the VIII St. Petersburg International Labor Forum. Three reports were presented at the section. The first report concerned the consideration of analytics as one of the basic labor competencies. The second report presented the results of a sociological study of informally self-employed people regarding their attitude towards formalization. The third report was devoted to the analysis of the development of human capital of Chinese civil servants from the perspective of the modern head of state Xi Jinping.