Ines Menezes

Inês Menezes is building Portugal’s first real-time labor market intelligence system for lifelong career navigation. Through myMentor, she provides citizens, educators, and policymakers with live data on skills demand, job trends, and training outcomes, helping people choose careers, schools design programs, and governments shape policies that match the realities of the labor market.

Across Portugal, career guidance is fragmented, reactive, and disconnected from real labor market dynamics. Individuals receive advice only at key transition moments, while employment services focus on vacancy matching using outdated data, and education systems design training programs without continuous feedback from actual demand. As a result, people navigate their working lives with partial, static information, and institutions operate without a shared mechanism to align skills, training, and employment outcomes.
While platforms like LinkedIn or traditional job portals provide access to job listings and professional networks, they remain fundamentally transactional and user-driven: they show opportunities, but do not guide individuals through the full journey of how to reach them, nor do they systematically inform public systems.
Inês Menezes addresses this structural gap by creating myMentor, a real-time, AI-powered career navigation infrastructure that transforms how individuals and institutions make decisions about work, skills, and training.
At its core, myMentor functions as a continuous labor market intelligence (LMI) engine, automatically processing live job postings and regional employment signals to identify emerging roles, in-demand skills, and evolving career pathways. Unlike traditional platforms, this intelligence does not stop at visibility of opportunities: it translates demand signals into personalized, end-to-end pathways, guiding individuals from career exploration to relevant training, skills development, and ultimately job application, including reskilling when needed.
Crucially, this intelligence is not only designed for individual users. MyMentor introduces a shared data spine that embeds real-time labor market insights directly into public systems. Employment services can move beyond matching candidates to vacancies and instead proactively guide people based on live demand signals, identifying which skills are needed locally and directing jobseekers toward viable pathways. Education and training providers can continuously adapt to their programs, adjusting course offerings, capacity, and curricula based on up-to-date demand data rather than static forecasts. For policymakers, this creates an entirely new level of granular, real-time visibility into local labor markets. Instead of relying on delayed national statistics, they can understand how demand for specific roles and skills evolves by municipality, sector, and region. This enables them to identify declining industries early, detect emerging sectors, and design targeted responses, such as reskilling programs aligned with actual vacancies, or incentives to attract workers into regions facing labor shortages.
Rather than operating as a standalone platform or service, myMentor is designed as a lifelong career navigation infrastructure: a system that accompanies individuals throughout their working lives while simultaneously informing institutional action. Its adoption reflects this shift, less like a program being implemented, and but a data system being integrated into state operations, redefining how employment, education, and policy systems interact.

Across the world, the way societies help people navigate work has not kept pace with how work and working lives are changing. As technological transformation accelerates, more than 20% of jobs globally are expected to change significantly by 2030 (World Economic Forum, 2025). At the same time, longer life expectancy extends working lives, making multiple career transitions the norm. This shift requires continuous upskilling and reorientation, yet the systems designed to support these transitions remain largely static and reactive.

This misalignment begins early. Career guidance in most countries is fragmented and episodic, concentrated at key transition points such as the end of schooling. Young people are expected to make critical decisions with limited access to up-to-date information about labor market trends, while guidance services are often overstretched and lack the tools to support large populations effectively. In Portugal, more than 60% of young people report lacking adequate information or support to make decisions about their future, with inequalities particularly pronounced in vulnerable territories. This reflects a broader structural gap: access to guidance and professional networks is unevenly distributed, often determined by family background, geography, or socio-economic status, rather than individual potential. As a result, those without privileged networks face significant barriers in exploring opportunities and building informed life paths.

As individuals enter and move through the labor market, this gap deepens. Information on emerging professions, evolving skills, and regional demand remains fragmented or outdated, leaving individuals, education providers, and policymakers without a shared, real-time understanding of labor market dynamics. Career support largely disappears after initial entry into employment and reappears only in moments of crisis, forcing people to navigate increasingly long and non-linear careers without continuous guidance.

The consequences are systemic. Across OECD countries, employers struggle to find workers with the right skills even when unemployment persists, reflecting a coordination failure rather than a lack of talent. In Portugal, this is particularly visible: around 41% of workers are employed outside their field of study, while a large share of adults lack the foundational skills needed to adapt to change. As a result, reskilling efforts are often inefficient, career trajectories are unstable, and human capital is underutilized.
At its core, this is not simply a problem of unemployment or skills gaps. It is a systemic failure across the life course: societies lack the infrastructure to support continuous career navigation in a context where people live longer, work longer, and must adapt their skills repeatedly. There is no mechanism to align individuals, education systems, and labor market demand in real time.

Inês Menezes is redefining how people navigate their careers by turning career guidance from a one-time decision into a lifelong process. She began by improving how students explore career options in schools and then expanded this approach into myMentor, a system that helps people make informed decisions about skills, training, and work throughout their lives, while enabling institutions to respond to changing labor market needs:
1. From school-based guidance to lifelong career navigation
In 2013, Inês began by tackling a critical gap in Portuguese schools, where career guidance relied largely on psychometric testing and offered little exposure to real professions, skills, or career pathways. Through Design the Future, she introduced a structured model that combined self-knowledge with active exploration of the labor market. Students could access professional profiles, skills description, and real-world insights from practitioners, while school psychologists integrate these tools into guidance processes.
This model gained strong traction, reaching between 50,000 and 90,000 users annually and scaling nationally through its integration into Escola Virtual, Portugal’s largest digital education platform developed by Porto Editora, one of the country’s leading educational publishers.
However, this phase revealed a structural limitation: guidance at age 17 does not address employability across a lifetime. As labor markets became more dynamic and careers more non-linear, adults lacked tools to navigate transitions, reskill, and reposition themselves.
In response, Inês launched myMentor in 2022, extending career guidance beyond adolescence and transforming it into a lifelong navigation system.
2. Turning labor market data into actionable intelligence
At the core of myMentor is a system that translates real-time labor market data into practical guidance for decision-making. This data is aggregated from multiple job portals and continuously processed through proprietary algorithms that analyze live job offers, extracting information on required skills, professions, and regional demand. The platform provides therefore a continuously updated view of which professions are emerging, which skills are in demand, and which training pathways lead to real opportunities.
For individuals, this enables more informed and strategic career decisions. Users can explore career options, understand the skills required, identify gaps, and access relevant training aligned with actual labor market demand.
For institutions, this shifts how decisions are made. Education providers can adjust training offers to evolving needs, employment services can guide users more proactively, and policymakers gain visibility over how skills, training, and employment outcomes connect.
At the territorial level, this intelligence also supports more coordinated workforce planning. Municipalities and regional actors can identify local demand, emerging sectors, and skills shortages, aligning economic development and training strategies with real labor market dynamics
3. Embedding career navigation into public systems
A central element of Inês’ strategy is institutional integration. Rather than operating as a standalone platform, myMentor is embedded into public and territorial systems, enabling scale and long-term sustainability.
The platform is already being adopted by Portugal’s public employment service, where it supports guidance processes and helps jobseekers navigate opportunities and training pathways more effectively. At the same time, municipalities use localized labor market insights to align workforce strategies with regional economic needs, while ministries draw on the information to address profession-specific shortages, such as teacher recruitment.
This institutional embedding allows the model to influence how decisions are made across the system—from how individuals access opportunities, to how training is designed, and how workforce policies respond to changing labor market conditions.
The system is also adaptable to specific structural challenges. Through initiatives such as Inclusive Careers, myMentor supports the employment inclusion of people with disabilities by combining accessible training, AI-supported interview preparation, mentorship, and inclusive hiring tools. Between 2025 and 2028, the initiative aims to support over 500 participants and collaborate with more than 60 companies.
The model is also beginning to inform migration and labor integration policies. In Lisbon, the City Council uses myMentor’s data to support the professional integration of migrants, connecting thousands of job opportunities and training offers. The platform has been adapted to improve accessibility, with content available in 17 languages, enabling users to navigate opportunities regardless of language barriers while helping match talent with sectors facing labor shortages.
Within the education and economic ecosystem, partnerships and pilot programs are expanding the platform’s use in schools, universities, and sector networks. Collaborations with universities, business associations, and public agencies—such as ISCTE (a leading public university), and CIP (the national business confederation), enable institutions and companies to better anticipate skills needs and workforce transitions.
To date, myMentor has reached more than 255,000 users, with over 43,000 active users and sustained growth (8% per quarter). This translates into clear behavioral change: 50% of users explore job opportunities, 51.8% apply, generating over 10,000 job applications, while 42.6% explore training and 25.6% enroll.
Lastly, Inês is now establishing the building blocks for scaling myMentor beyond Portugal, approaching international expansion with rigor rather than simple replication. She is focusing first on Spain and Brazil, recognizing that each context requires substantial adaptation: new data collection processes for different job-posting ecosystems, alignment with distinct employment systems, language localization, and country-specific institutional partners. In Brazil, she is preparing a pathway through a core Brazilian technology team member who intends to return and lead the technical and contextual modifications needed to begin locally. In Spain, she is pursuing a contained pilot in one autonomous community, testing a Spanish-language version of myMentor at smaller scale before broader expansion. This phased approach reflects how Inês sees her work: as a long-term journey to build lifelong career navigation infrastructure across countries, with ambitious but carefully sequenced steps.

Inês Menezes grew up in an environment that fostered initiative and problem-solving, influenced by her father’s entrepreneurial mindset. From an early age, she developed a strong sense of responsibility and a drive to turn challenges into opportunities, alongside a deep search for purpose.
At 16, she began translating this purpose into action through a Jesuit youth movement, where she organized peer-led tutoring programs for children in marginalized communities. Without formal resources, she organized, together with ohers and sustained these initiatives over several years, showing early leadership and ability to build solutions from scratch.
Despite this early clarity of purpose, her path was not straightforward. Lacking guidance and resources, Inês initially pursued a career in communication at J. Walter Thompson Portugal and later at Publicis Groupe Portugal, another multinational advertising agency, but felt increasingly disconnected from work without deeper meaning. Seeking purpose, she transitioned into journalism, focusing on education, resilience, and human development, and developed a strong editorial voice. This led her into political communication, participating in a nationwide campaign for a civic movement, where she engaged young people across the country and gained insight into the challenges of depopulated, isolated regions.
During this period, Inês faced a turning point with the sudden loss of her brother, which intensified her sense of urgency and commitment to creating meaningful, lasting impact and ultimately finding her purpose. At the same time, her niece struggled to navigate her future due to a lack of guidance, echoing Inês’ own earlier uncertainty and revealing a gap had not yet addressed. Through her work with youth and universities, she saw this pattern repeated widely: many young people lacked self-awareness, understanding of professions, and the support needed to make informed decisions, highlighting a systemic issue that would become central to her work.
Recognizing this issue, Inês began building solutions and finding her purpose. In 2013, she co-founded Better Future and launched Design the Future, a platform designed to help young people understand their strengths, explore professions, and connect education choices with real opportunities. Combining digital tools, psychological insights, and practical content, the platform grew to reach tens of thousands of users annually and became integrated into schools and institutional programs.
As Design the Future matured, she identified a deeper systemic gap: career guidance focused only on youth was insufficient in a rapidly changing labor market. People needed continuous support throughout their lives. Therefore, she later launched myMentor (2019), expanding support to adults facing unemployment or reskilling needs. By connecting public institutions, universities, and companies, she built a system that integrates lifelong self-knowledge, training, and labor market insights.
Across her trajectory, Inês consistently demonstrates a changemaker pattern: transforming personal insight into systemic solutions, mobilizing stakeholders, and building scalable models that address structural gaps in how people find direction and purpose in life.