Portugal as a country exporting talent: Image of young high-skilled Portuguese people working outside Portugal

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Portugal is the third country of the seventeen European countries with the highest unemployment rate and one of the three with the highest increases in the current years (Eurostat, 2013). The purpose of this thesis is to understand the image of young high-skilled Portuguese people working outside their country-of-origin and how this image can be improved in order to increase the opportunities of having a successful career abroad, as Portugal cannot currently offer those opportunities. We conducted a marketing research study targeting high-skilled Portuguese people working abroad (HSPWA), organized in two phases: 1) a pilot study and 2) a questionnaire with open-ended questions on 65 HSPWA. The main conclusions are: a) the initial image of young high-skilled Portuguese workers is not very good, partially because of the country-of-origin (COO) effect; b) because expectations are low and performance is higher than expected, HSPWA are able to inverse the initial perception and “erase” the COO effect.