Our Commitment | Global Memorandum — Career Transition in Portugal

What does a principled approach to career transition look like?

The career transition industry contains a lot of noise — personality frameworks, job-board optimisation, LinkedIn tactics. Some of it is useful. Much of it skips the foundational work. Our commitment is to the foundational work.

Clarity before direction

The instinct when you feel stuck is to reach for a new destination — a different sector, a different role, a different country. That instinct is understandable but often premature. Without a clear understanding of what you have, any direction you choose is essentially guesswork. We work on clarity first. Direction follows from that, and it follows more reliably.

Experience is not the same as awareness of experience

Most mid-career professionals have accumulated far more capability than they're aware of. The problem isn't a lack of skills — it's that fifteen years of focused work in one industry tends to make your skills invisible to you. You stop noticing what you can do because it's become automatic. The skills audit process is designed to make the invisible visible again.

The Portuguese market has its own logic

Career transition programmes designed for the UK or US market don't map cleanly onto Portugal. The professional network structures are different, the sector dynamics are different, the pace and norms of professional relationship-building are different. Our programme is built around how things actually work here — not how a generic international model assumes they work.

The group is part of the methodology

We work in cohorts deliberately, not as a cost-saving measure. Something specific happens when a secondary school teacher and a civil engineer both recognise the same competency in each other's professional story — it shifts how both of them see their own transferability. That cross-industry recognition is difficult to manufacture in an individual coaching context. It happens naturally in a well-facilitated group.

We don't have an agenda for your outcome

We're not recruiters. We don't benefit from placing you in any particular sector, role, or organisation. We have no employer partnerships that would create a conflict of interest. Our only interest is that you arrive at the end of four weeks with a clearer, more accurate understanding of your professional value — and that this clarity is genuinely useful to you, whatever you decide to do with it.

Four weeks is enough to do meaningful work

Longer programmes tend to drift. The urgency dissipates, the cohort loses coherence, and the work becomes diffuse. Four weeks with structured sessions and clear weekly outcomes is enough to do the foundational work thoroughly — and short enough that participants maintain focus and momentum throughout.

Programme facilitator leading a structured career transition session with engaged participants in a well-lit Lisbon workspace

What does this look like in practice?

Each cohort works through a structured four-week sequence. Sessions combine facilitated group work with individual exercises that participants complete between sessions. The methodology is consistent across cohorts; the experience is shaped by who's in the room.

We work with small groups — large enough to generate genuine cross-industry perspective, small enough that every participant gets meaningful attention and the group develops real cohesion over the four weeks.

Sessions take place in Lisbon, at our office and at partner venues. The programme is conducted in English, though facilitators work across Portuguese and English as needed by the cohort.

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What we don't do — and why that matters

We don't recommend specific employers

Recommending specific employers would require us to have opinions about organisations we don't have inside knowledge of. We help you understand your market options — the choice of where to apply is yours.

We don't promise specific outcomes

Career transition involves variables we don't control — market conditions, personal circumstances, the decisions you make. We commit to the quality and rigour of our process. We don't make claims about what that process will produce for any individual.

We don't use personality typing as a career guide

Personality frameworks have their uses. Using them as the primary basis for career decisions is not one of them. Our methodology is built on competency analysis, not typology.

We don't work with everyone who enquires

The programme works best for people at a specific stage: substantial experience in one industry, genuine uncertainty about next steps, and readiness to do structured reflective work. We have an initial conversation with everyone who enquires to assess whether the programme is a reasonable fit.

What we believe about career transition — and why it shapes everything we do