• Pol Codina, Business Management and Administration and Economics alumnus, Country Manager at PepsiCo (Lisbon, Portugal)

Pol Codina Camps took a double degree in Business Management and Administration and Economics at UPF (class of 2005). As part of his studies, he did an Erasmus exchange at Linköping University (Sweden). He has been working in business and marketing for more than 15 years, the last two as Country Manager for Portugal at PepsiCo, a position that allows him to lead the business unit’s strategy and manage talent.

He has held various positions at this food and beverage industry multinational, where he has worked (intermittently) for nearly 13 years, from sales director to national accounts director, amongst others. He has also worked for other firms, such as Bacardi or Converse Iberia (Nike). ‘I think the playing field for any company today is the world, because the competition is global. It’s more obvious at multinationals, though, because they have business units all over’, he says.

According to Pol, ‘If you want to build a career, sooner or later you have to leave, sometimes for places you may never have considered. Opportunities mainly come up in countries with strong growth, which are usually developing countries, where the talent has not yet had a chance to develop’, he says.

His own career has brought him to Lisbon (Portugal), where he has lived with his family for almost two years. ‘My desire to keep growing, to give my children a unique opportunity, to strengthen ourselves as a family and to take on a fulfilling professional challenge was what brought me here’, he explains. His main goal is ‘to find a balance between enjoying myself professionally and being there every day with my partner and children and achieving my professional goals. I have three kids under the age of six and I have to make the time’, he says.

“Identity and having a place in the world will be more important than ever”

Pol says someday he wants to return to Catalonia. ‘We would like to have one or two more international experiences before going back, when the kids are teenagers. We want to give them wings, but also roots. Identity and having a place in the world will be more important than ever.’

Looking back, he has a pleasant view of his time at UPF. ‘Freedom, inside and outside of the faculty, and the feeling of leading my life fully: I went from living with my parents in a town in Girona to living alone in a flat in Gràcia when I was 17.’ He has fond memories of the people he met, of the hours spent studying until late in the Dipòsit de les Aigües library (‘an utterly unique place that I have revisited with nostalgia’) and meetings with the dean to discuss improvements for the faculty.

Photo gallery

Pol Codina, in different settings in Portugal, and with his partner.