Europe / Young Professionals Brain Drain

Tiago Lambuca left Portugal to search for work here as an architect, but the decision to emigrate was about more than earning a wage. “You can find work in Portugal . . . but nothing that offers a career,” the 29-year-old said as he sipped juice in an open-air cafe in the shadow of Sao Paulo’s art museum. “It all happened very fast. I came over for two weeks. In two days I had settled on a job” and also enrolled in an MBA program.

After five years of slow growth or recession and an increasing sense of Europe’s limits, Lambuca is not alone. He and other young Portuguese professionals have begun turning to Brazil, a former Portuguese colony that shares the language, as a culturally familiar way to escape their home nation’s doldrums.

He and others recently interviewed in Brazil were not unemployed at home. They all spoke of internships, year-long work stints in other euro-zone countries, and other jobs they had held despite rising regional unemployment. But they were deeply disenchanted with the opportunities that Portugal, Spain or other European nations held for them to build their careers, and they felt the continent had become a dead end.

Choosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from

via Europe’s fading fortunes push young professionals abroad – The Washington Post.