Analysis: Executives on the run; Argentina has become a brain drain outlet store

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Each person has a built-in capital, the result of his or her experience and accumulated diplomas. Argentina has become a blender of these credentials. The talent outlet is at subway levels. It has been going down and down, being totally out of step with the global scale.

Argentina has more than one million emigrants living abroad, a figure that does not include the second or third generation born outside the country. According to the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), the country is in the top 30 of nations with highly skilled emigrants.

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Unlike the emigrants of 2001, many of those leaving are not people who became unemployed. Many of those who emigrate do so to invest abroad, discouraged from doing so locally by the tax burden and the lack of a clearer horizon.

All this is a great incentive for the exodus, especially considering that salaries abroad are three or four times higher than those paid in the local market. However, many do not wish to do so. Some have found alternatives, such as working for international companies from Argentina. For them, there are other inconveniences linked to the entry of these currencies with a system that seeks to sniff out every particle of the dollar.

Pedro García is one of the cases who, living in the country, bet on having an employer abroad. “At the beginning of 2020, I went on an MBA exchange program to Finland, with the idea of making contacts or raising my profile to look for a job in Europe, a better future, and a more stable country. But the pandemic arrived in the middle of my trip and cut short my plans for my long-awaited migration.”

Pedro worked at Despegar, the online travel agency and, during the pandemic, he took charge of a team in Brazil where he went when the sanitary conditions were adequate.

However, a new opportunity changed his plans. “In the midst of this work and personal madness, a unique opportunity arose for me to work in an industry that I am passionate about. Apart from engineering, I studied two years as a gastronomic professional, so this opportunity allows me to unite my passion for cooking with my profession at CookUnity, a company that allows access to dishes made by renowned chefs at a low cost through a subscription model and exploiting the dark kitchen concept in partnership with these chefs.”

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

The acceleration of online work, a product of the confinement forced by the pandemic, began to offer international opportunities to many professionals beyond those in the area of systems and technology. This is a problem in countries that, like Argentina, generate good professionals who receive derisory salaries at international level.

Why is this a problem? Because many, the good ones and those who have knowledge that the market needs, will prefer to sell it abroad, working from wherever they want without having to go to the office, suffer an unbearable boss and have the profit filter corrode the already low local salary.

Human resources management is going to have to be an important focus in companies that are not only competing locally for talent; they are also competing internationally without the need for people to move from their homes. In the country, freelance work platforms have grown.

Workana has seen a 45% increase in the number of freelancers registered since the beginning of the pandemic, with more than 355,000 freelancers in the country alone. The lockdown allowed Argentines to reflect on how they wanted to live and with whom they want to work and from where. Moreover, liberal, open, stable, reasonable, and investment-friendly Uruguay is just around the corner.

In this sense, Argentina is not the only country where things are changing. In the United States, the number of people who consider themselves “digital nomads” exploded, that is, those who work remotely from wherever they want to do so. In 2019, 7.3 million Americans defined themselves as “digital nomads.” Today, that number rose to 15.5 million.

Returning to Argentina, the shortage of talent in some areas, added to the defection of many trained and prepared Argentines to better international destinations, puts companies against the wall of having to rethink talent management and compensation.

The juggling that companies are doing today to allow them to generate benefits that adapt to the old local labor system disappoints the recipients of the benefits, who always end up being cut by the fiscal scythe.

The phenomenon of cheap talent operates at the cultural level, generating a certain disappointment in relation to the fact that efforts do not produce a commensurate salary valuation.

This discourages in some cases the search for improvement. This is not minor, because it undermines the notion of meritocracy linked to the attempt for personal progress, but without disregarding its collective connection.

Deciding to emigrate has a lot to do with the symbolic imaginaries of success. What this produces at the social level is a deterioration of conditions and expectations. The problem is no longer only those who left. Those who leave produce a centripetal symbolic force: “it is better to leave because those who were more talented than me have already left.”

This generates a feeling: to be successful is to go through Ezeiza international airport. And it further liquefies the local market, which appears as unappetizing for those who wish to grow professionally. This reproduces the “Matthew Effect”, described by the American sociologist Robert Merton, linked to accumulation phenomena: the country that has accumulated talent imports even more talent, and the exporting country is left with less and less. Leaving becomes an increasingly precious capital.

Politics should be paying much more attention to these social phenomena. Argentina can only rebuild itself with human talent. If we run out of it, then the future will be darker and darker.

With information from La Nacion