MEET YOUR BEAUTY MENTORING: Drawing a new map for career exploration.
#INTRO
“What is your dream?”
It is the easiest question for adults to ask, yet the hardest one for children to answer. This question feels even more overwhelming for children in underserved areas, where career experience facilities are scarce and opportunities to meet adults from diverse professional backgrounds are limited.
The “Meet Your Beauty Mentoring” initiative begins by changing this very question. Instead of asking, “What is your dream?” we ask, “What kind of things do you love?” What started last year as a tiny spark at a small middle school in Jindo, Jeollanam-do, has now grown into a fully structured program. Here is the story of how we are heading back out to meet the children this year.
01 What is the Meet Your Beauty Mentoring Initiative?
“Meet Your Beauty Mentoring” is Amorepacific’s social contribution program designed for youth in depopulated and underserved areas who lack sufficient career education opportunities. The program empowers them to explore future paths based on self-understanding, learn from mentors across diverse professions, and ultimately design their own career trajectories.
The core issue this initiative addresses is “experience poverty.” Regardless of their family’s financial status, children in depopulated regions face restricted opportunities for diverse experiences simply due to geographical and physical limitations. This restricted experience creates a vicious cycle: a narrow worldview leading to confined aspirations. To break this cycle, Meet Your Beauty Mentoring targets three key transformations: the power to understand oneself (self-understanding), the belief in one’s own capability (self-efficacy), and the capacity to map out a concrete future (career design).
The program is systematically structured to connect online and offline experiences.
First, via the online mentoring web tool, students begin by discovering themselves through a career exploration test. Based on their results, they receive personalized recommendations for career types and mentors, and they can explore narrative-driven content about those mentors. Step-by-step missions and an AI chatbot guide them through this journey of discovery, while all activities are digitally archived as personal records.
Following this, the offline mentoring phase allows students to meet the mentors from their desired career paths in person. They gain hands-on experience with actual job tasks and design their own career portfolios alongside their mentors. In the final showcase, students present their individual career portfolios and the stories of their journey. Rather than ending as a one-time experience, the program ensures that students walk away with a personalized, ongoing career record that they can continue to update as they grow.
02 The "Haebang Project": Seeds of Growth Sprouted in Jindo
The starting point of this initiative lies in the “Haebang (Liberation) Project,” a pilot program conducted last year at Gunnae Middle School in Jindo-gun, Jeollanam-do.
For the 29 students attending this small school, their daily lives were largely confined to just three places: home, school, and the local convenience store. With a three-hour bus interval and a 50-minute walk to the nearest convenience store, these children were restricted by a “barrier of mobility.” This barrier inevitably led to a poverty of experience, which in turn limited the scale of their dreams.
To instill the belief that “we can experience anything we desire,” the Haebang Project began by gifting bicycles to the students. The children created “Haebang Mates”—custom AI characters reflecting their future aspirations—to decorate their one-of-a-kind bicycles. They wrote down the destinations they wished to visit in their “Haebang Journals” and pedaled their way there under their own power.
The day they finally rode along the Han River in Seoul and arrived at the Amorepacific headquarters, the students were introduced to employee mentors from various departments. This was not a conventional career-day session simply introducing job descriptions. Instead, it was a meaningful time where mentors shared their personal life stories—illustrating how curiosity about the world leads to challenges, and how those challenges accumulate to form one’s unique path. Through these genuine connections, the children learned that experiencing failure is merely part of the process of moving closer to their dreams, and a way of mapping out their own definition of success.
Upon returning to school after the mentoring sessions, the children shared the inner transformations sparked by these experiences through personal reflections, leaving messages such as: “I’m going to draw even harder to achieve my dream of becoming a game concept artist!”, “I will practice singing for two hours every single day,” and “If I keep pushing forward and working hard, won’t I be able to achieve my dream?”
The undeniable potential for change witnessed at this small school became the very seed that blossomed into the official 2026 Meet Your Beauty Mentoring initiative, which is now expanding to reach children in many more regions.
03 The Reality of the Career Gap: A Survey of 626 Students
Prior to designing the official initiative, we conducted a study starting in March of this year, surveying 626 middle school students and 31 teachers across underserved regions (Jindo-gun and Wando-gun) and non-underserved regions (Seoul and the greater metropolitan area) to evaluate the current state of career education. The findings vividly illustrated the reality of a “gap” that had previously only been presumed.
The gap did not lie in satisfaction levels, but rather in environmental conditions. In underserved areas, 46% of students responded that local career experience infrastructure was “insufficient or entirely non-existent”—nearly four times higher than the 12% reported in non-underserved areas. A significant disparity also emerged regarding career classes, with 8.9% of students in underserved areas stating that such classes were “rarely conducted,” compared to just 0.4% in non-underserved regions. Interestingly, class satisfaction was slightly higher in underserved areas. This can be interpreted as a “paradox of structural deprivation,” where limited access to comparative experiences lowers overall expectations. Consequently, the goal of Meet Your Beauty Mentoring is not merely to “address dissatisfaction,” but to fundamentally elevate the baseline of experience itself.
What students desired most was “finding my areas of interest.” When asked about the most necessary activity for their future career, finding personal interests ranked first across all grades (72% in 7th grade, 74% in 8th grade, and 66% in 9th grade). Furthermore, 71.7% of students chose “hands-on career experience opportunities” as the most critical element of career classes. The youth were seeking an exploration process that begins with “self,” rather than simply receiving information on popular occupations.
In addition, the children were dreaming of “roles” rather than just job titles. When asked about their ideal future career paths, 64.1% of students chose “having a job while playing a positive role in society,” significantly outpacing those who chose a “fixed specific job” (24.3%). Combined, responses oriented toward social roles reached 76%, a consistent trend observed regardless of the region.
These findings served as the foundational design principles for our program: begin with the individual, connect through hands-on experience, and present mentors based on “the kind of work they do” rather than just their official job titles.
04 54 Career Domains and the Mentors
The interests students expressed in the survey were remarkably diverse, ranging from veterinarians and navigators to career soldiers and hair designers. However, what the children were truly curious about was not mere job data, but the stories of the people living those professions. Traditional career education has often failed to capture the life stories hidden behind job descriptions, and these children lacked adults in their lives to share such journeys. We discovered that what students needed most was not simple “occupational information,” but the stories of “adults living out their dreams.” To introduce a broader world and its people without confining them to rigid job titles, the Meet Your Beauty Mentoring initiative developed its own proprietary career matrix model consisting of 54 domains—spanning 9 fields and 6 activity types. Instead of a standard list of professions, this framework maps out careers based on “which field and in what manner a person works.” The online career exploration test utilizes this model to seamlessly connect student interests and career types with the right mentors.
Recruiting the mentors to fill this map is already yielding meaningful fruit. Currently, around 60 internal mentors from Amorepacific and external professionals have joined the program, securing mentors for 80% of the 54 domains, with the remaining areas steadily being filled.
The mentor content focuses on a person’s life journey rather than a conventional job description—covering their childhood aspirations, current goals, middle school struggles, winding career paths, and even their current daily routines. Through these authentic narratives, where dreams shift and jobs evolve while core passions remain, students naturally come to understand a vital message: “A career path is not decided all at once; it is something you continuously build over time.”
05 This Fall, the Journey Begins
The core program of the Meet Your Beauty Mentoring initiative will launch in the fall of 2026, in close partnership with regional offices of education and schools in underserved areas. Students will first discover themselves and their personal interests through the online career exploration test and mentor content. They will then meet the mentors from their desired fields in person during offline, hands-on mentoring sessions to experience actual job tasks. This entire journey will be archived into a personalized career portfolio, which remains with the children to support their ongoing growth long after the program concludes.
The transformation that Meet Your Beauty Mentoring aims to create is clear. Just as the pilot program in Jindo demonstrated, it is about providing the opportunity to experience things freely, fostering the belief that “I can do it,” and enabling youth to map out a concrete future. As these three elements elevate one another, they will empower children to overcome environmental limitations and stand tall as the true authors of their own lives.
#OUTRO
It is perfectly okay if you cannot answer the question, “What is your dream?” yet. The children of Jindo were once the same. However, they now begin their journey with a different question: “What kind of things do I love?”
We believe that exploration rooted in self-discovery leads to inspiring connections with mentors, and that these connections empower youth to design their own unique futures. This fall, Meet Your Beauty Mentoring will stand alongside even more children to share in that journey.
