Portuguese Prime Minister notes the country’s capacity to attract tech investment Portugal is a country of excellence for anything relating to digital transformation and[...]

The Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa noted the capacity Portugal has shown to attract high tech investments in the ceremony where Deloitte, one of the biggest consulting firms in the world, announced the creation of two technological and digital transformation centres in Portugal. The company is set to create 1,500 to 2,000 new highly qualified jobs in the coming four years.

These investments are two global centres of excellence, whose tasks will be highly qualified and differentiated, as the services to be provided by these two centres will be of added value and with a strong innovation component, and "clearly show what Portugal has the opportunity to do", the Prime Minister claimed.

From Portugal, the firm's Global Tech Solutions Centre of Excellence, and the Global Telecom Solutions Centre of Excellence will offer services on a global scale, focusing particularly on the European and North American markets.

Portugal "is a country of excellence for housing anything that has to do with digital transformation and network development" because "it is the closest point to North and South America on the Atlantic", a geographical location that is great for "an aeronautical hub and for landing new means of digital communication", António Costa said.

Qualification

The Prime Minister also noted that Portugal has another resource "it didn't have before in its history: for the first time, we have a generation with qualification levels close to the average in any EU country". "This imposes huge exigency. A more qualified generation is necessarily a more exigent generation", he added.

These investments, which are shaping the profile of the Portuguese economy, require highly qualified workers and one of the country's goals is to "increase training in science, technology, art and mathematics by 2026", which "implies training up to ten thousand people more than at the moment in all of these areas combined".

"If we are able to pursue this effort with discipline and persistence, we will be able to transform the country's economic profile. This cannot be transformed by waving a magic wand, wages don't go up with the wave of a magic wand. Wages go up if there is more qualified labour. And there will be more qualified labour if the companies have the capacity to bring to Portugal the production of services and goods with greater added value, increasing competitiveness," he highlighted.

Persistence

These transformations require "persistence and not hesitations": "if in 20 years Portugal was able to quadruple the number of students in higher education, it's because for 40 years we were able to transform a passion", that of education, "into something that came to fruition from pre-school to higher education", he said.

The "capacity to expand inclusion and integration in schooling more and more and to have increasingly higher quality education gives meaning to the necessary demand to have highly qualified workers", he added.

The Prime Minister claimed that the central aims are to qualify the younger generations, retaining them in the country, and the vocational requalification of a large part of current workers, especially in technological areas.

"We must continue to lower early school dropouts, increase access to higher education, increase the number of students who complete master's degrees and move on to their PhDs. That is crucial", he noted, adding that to do so, "it is incredibly important for us to have higher education on offer in more than 100 locations in the country".