A structured, methodical programme for mid-career professionals in Portugal who want to understand what they've built before deciding what to build next.
The Global Memorandum career transition programme is a four-week group experience for mid-career professionals who have substantial experience in one industry and are considering what comes next. It is not a job search course. It is not a coaching programme in the traditional sense. It is a structured process for developing clarity about professional value — what you have, how to articulate it, and how to position it in the Portuguese market.
Each week addresses a distinct element of that process. The weeks build sequentially: you cannot map competencies you haven't audited, and you cannot develop a professional narrative without understanding which competencies to foreground. The structure is intentional.
The skills audit is a structured inventory process — methodical, documented, and deliberately stripped of job titles and industry-specific language. Most mid-career professionals have never done this properly. They know their CV, which is a marketing document shaped by convention. The skills audit is something different: an honest accounting of capability.
The process works through several distinct categories of skill — technical knowledge, procedural expertise, relational capability, analytical approaches, management and coordination competencies, and domain knowledge that transfers across contexts. For each category, participants document what they can do, how they know they can do it, and what evidence exists for it.
The output of week one is a comprehensive skills inventory — a document that participants often find surprising in its breadth. The invisibility of accumulated expertise is one of the most consistent patterns we encounter in mid-career professionals.
A comprehensive inventory of what you can actually do — documented, organised, and examined without the distortion of your current job title or industry assumptions.
With a skills inventory in hand, week two works through a structured mapping process to identify which competencies transfer — and to which contexts. This is more nuanced than it sounds. The same competency can be highly transferable or poorly transferable depending on how it's understood and expressed.
A construction project manager's risk assessment capability, for example, is genuinely transferable to financial services, insurance, infrastructure planning, and several other sectors. But only if it's articulated in terms that people in those sectors recognise. Week two works on both the identification and the language.
The Portuguese market context is central to this week. We work through which sectors in Portugal have active demand for cross-industry competence, where mid-career professionals from specific backgrounds have moved successfully, and how the Portuguese professional landscape understands transferability.
Identifying which of your capabilities carry value in contexts you haven't considered — and how to articulate them to people outside your current industry.
A career story that makes sense inside your industry often doesn't translate outside it. This is one of the most common and most fixable obstacles in mid-career transition. The professional narrative work in week three addresses this directly.
The goal is not to produce a polished elevator pitch. It's to develop a coherent, honest account of your career that communicates your value to someone who has never worked in your field and doesn't need to in order to understand what you bring. This is harder than it sounds, and it's where many mid-career professionals get stuck.
The week works through narrative structure, the selection of which elements of your background to foreground, and the challenge of making industry-specific experience legible to an outside audience. Group work is particularly valuable here — participants test their narratives on each other, and the cross-industry feedback is often the most useful input they receive.
Building a coherent story about your career that makes sense to someone who has never worked in your field — and doesn't need to in order to understand your value.
The final week addresses the practical question of how to move — not with a job application strategy, but with an understanding of how professional networks in Portugal actually function. This is important: the Portuguese professional landscape has specific characteristics that differ from other European markets, and approaches that work elsewhere often don't work here.
Professional relationships in Portugal are built through sustained, patient interaction — not transactional networking events. Sector entry often happens through referral networks that take time to access. Understanding how these networks are structured, and how to begin building meaningful presence within them, is the focus of week four.
The week also addresses the practical tools of professional presence — not as a job-search exercise, but as a way of making yourself findable and legible to people in sectors you're exploring. The distinction matters: we're not optimising a job application, we're building the foundation for professional relationships in new contexts.
Understanding how professional networks function in the Portuguese market and how to build meaningful connections in sectors you're exploring — without cold-calling into the void.
Cohorts are kept small to ensure every participant receives meaningful attention and the group develops genuine cohesion over the four weeks. The group is large enough to generate cross-industry perspective; small enough for real conversation.
Four weeks, with structured sessions and individual work between sessions. The programme is designed to fit alongside professional commitments — though it requires genuine engagement between sessions to produce useful outputs.
Sessions take place in Lisbon, at our office on Rua Soeiro Pereira Gomes and at partner venues across the city. The programme is conducted in English, with facilitation available in Portuguese as needed.
Each week produces a concrete document — skills inventory, competency map, professional narrative, networking strategy. Participants leave with a portfolio of materials they've developed through the programme, not just reflections.
The programme is designed for professionals with substantial experience in one industry — typically ten or more years — who are genuinely considering what comes next. We have an initial conversation with everyone who enquires to assess fit.
The programme is conducted in English. Facilitators are fluent in Portuguese and English. Programme materials are available in both languages. Contact us if language is a consideration for your participation.
We have an initial conversation with everyone who enquires. It's an opportunity to understand your situation and for you to understand whether the programme addresses what you're looking for.