Research Projects
Localisation Strategy
Beyond experience-based career exploration in Germany's BvB — toward a Korean model that combines self-understanding and metacognition
The Institute draws on the structure of Germany's BvB (Berufsvorbereitende Bildungsmaßnahmen) — individual diagnostics, career exploration, field experience, and mentoring — and reconstructs it for Korea's youth education and employment context.
Rather than simply importing an overseas programme, we build a new career-development model that moves beyond the limits of Korea's existing youth employment support and enables young people to discover and design their own paths.
Differentiating from vocational-training-centred policy
Korea currently operates a range of career and employment support programmes to help youth gain experience and enter the workforce — the Ministry of Employment and Labor's Youth Work Experience Programme and the National Employment Support Programme, among others. These programmes, however, focus mainly on providing occupational information and job placement, so the long-term process of comprehensively exploring a young person's tendencies, values, and inner life — and connecting them to real experience to ask ‘what direction is right for me?’ — is relatively underdeveloped.
In response, the Institute grafts BvB's core structure — individual diagnostics, occupational competency exploration, and in-depth inner analysis — onto Korea's youth capacity-building system, not by expanding simple vocational training that duplicates existing policy, but by strengthening a process of self-exploration grounded in self-understanding and metacognition.
From ‘finding a job’ to ‘understanding yourself’
Rather than deciding a person's career by aptitude tests or occupational information alone, we operate a cycle of Cognition → Self-exploration → Reflection → Application.
In the early stage, we diagnose individual tendencies, values, strengths, competencies, and preferred work environments. Participants then record their emotions and behaviours, strengths and difficulties, and the gaps between expectation and actual experience, and analyse them with a mentor — applying the self-understanding discovered through reflection to career choices and capability development.
Metacognition-based mentoring
The mentor's role is not to recommend a particular job or direction, or to hand over a ‘right answer’. Through questions and feedback, mentors act as facilitators who help the individual look at their experience objectively and, within it, discover their own competencies and possibilities — supporting inner cognition and reflection.
The Korean career-development model we aim for
The Institute reconstructs BvB's structure of individual diagnostics, career exploration, field experience, and mentoring to fit Korea's youth employment support environment, and combines it with a reflection process grounded in self-understanding and metacognition. This supports young people in understanding their own competencies and possibilities, exploring and reflecting on their paths through diverse experiences, and connecting the self-understanding they discover to capability development and career design.
Ultimately, the Institute aims to build a Korean career-development system that connects self-understanding – experience – reflection – design, going beyond mere ‘vocational training for employment’. Our ultimate goal is to help young people move beyond simply choosing an available job, to understand themselves, confirm their possibilities through experience, and — within a changing environment — continuously explore and lead the design of their own careers.