History of Gowork: from humble beginnings to a global presence

Gowork was created with the mission to build a safe space for employees to share their workplace experience without consequences from their supervisors. Today, it is a company operating in 6 European countries which, in addition to an online forum with 18 million users in 2022, runs a post-secondary school, as well as training courses for managerial staff and education workers.

But how did it start?

Like many successful initiatives, it all started with spotting a real problem and trying to solve it.

It may come as a surprise to some, but Gowork already boasts a history of more than 30 years, as the company was founded in 1990 (that’s much earlier than Trustpilot or Glassdoor). Gowork initially recruited employees for temporary and abroad work. But how do you trust a company when you can’t screen it and know the exact scope of its activities at the click of a button? It may seem abstract now, but it was then that it was noticed that employees had a need to exchange experiences about employers and assignments. Sometimes they wanted to warn others about a particular place without experiencing the consequences, other times they wanted to recommend jobs to other job seekers for whom the foreign market was distant and unknown. These were times when the Internet was just beginning to crawl and was not available to everyone. It was difficult to learn about the labour market in a particular place, what challenges awaited newcomers, what wages could be hoped for. Real-life experiences of people working in a place were at a premium.

And so it is to this day

But Gowork is not only an online forum. The job service of Gowork was established in 2005, but in the meantime complementary activities to the job search itself or to giving opinions have also been developed. We expanded our activities to include a segment of training and courses to equip participants with the practical knowledge needed for a particular job. And so today, in addition to open training courses in accountancy, gastronomy or architecture, it offers “tailor-made” courses for business customers.

In 2010, the company decided to open its first post-secondary school, which allows you to continue education in a chosen profession after completing secondary school education. What distinguishes a post-secondary school from a training is that most courses are free of charge and easily accessible thanks to locations in major cities. Unfortunately, so far it is only available in Poland.

Gowork has based its activity in the European markets since 2012 mainly on forum about workplaces. The reason for this is simple: there are many websites with job offers, but no forum that allows you to give your opinion anonymously. We consider this to be an asset, because no one in the market gives employees or customers the opportunity to give an opinion without fear of facing consequences for doing so. All our day-to-day activities are transparent and aimed at building a reliable knowledge base about companies (*read our transparency report). We are open to any experience with a company, which is why we give a voice to both employers, customers and employees, with more emphasis on the latter group, as customers are more likely to express their opinions online non-anonymously, without having a relationship with the company. For employees, the situation is different.

Gowork puts the employer in contact with the employee. Interaction, dialogue are the key to reaching a compromise, to improving working conditions, to offering better services. It is also a place to present your opinion and the official position of the company. The employee/client is not always right, so we encourage you not to leave their opinions unanswered.

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