Why I Built GWEN

It Started with a Coffee Chat

My wife Sherin came home from her MBA program at Curtin University in Perth one evening, frustrated. She'd been talking to classmates — smart, motivated people from all over the world — who were struggling to land jobs in Australia. Not because they lacked talent or education, but because they didn't have local work experience. Employers wanted proof you could do the work. Universities gave you theory.

"We should do something about this," she said. I sipped on my flat white. After a few brainstorming sessions and an accelerator program later, we launched UPitch.ME — a platform that connected early-career talent with opportunities through speed networking events and an AI-curated job feed that pulled roles from multiple boards and made applying easier. We moved from Perth to Melbourne, kept building, and were among the three winners of the City of Melbourne's Open Innovation Challenge 2023.

Finding the Real Problem

We went to more job fairs and started talking to everyone we could find in the early career development space — university career advisors, recruiters, hiring managers, bootcamp graduates, junior talent stuck in application limbo.

The same problem kept surfacing: the hardest thing to solve was work experience itself.

Not the resume. Not the job search. Not interview skills. The fundamental gap was that graduates had no way to demonstrate they could actually do the work in a realistic professional setting. They had course projects and hypothetical case studies, but nothing that resembled real workplace dynamics — collaborating with stakeholders, dealing with ambiguity, receiving critical feedback, and iterating under pressure.

A Pivotal Conversation

On a trip to London, I was sitting with Alejandro, an old-time friend and teammate from my previous FinTech ventures in London. He's a brilliant UX designer, and he made an observation that stopped me in my tracks:

"Remember when we had graduates joining our teams? We coached them, brought in mentors, made sure knowledge got transferred. They could experiment, make mistakes, iterate. You gave them... a playground."

A playground for young talent. A safe space where you could try things, fail, learn, and grow — with real projects, real feedback, and real professional dynamics. Not a classroom simulation. A genuine learning environment that mimicked the messiness and richness of actual work.

I couldn't stop thinking about it. What if I could take that learning/working experience and build it into a scaleable platform?

That's when GWEN was born. It stands for Get Work Experience Now, because that urgency is exactly what early-career talent feels.

From Prototype to Platform

Grand visions are dangerous if you don't validate them quickly. So I kept my first prototype beautifully simple: A virtual UX Design internship on WhatsApp and Notion.

I recruited a small group of UX students. I re-created work scenarios and briefs I'd seen play out in my career. They completed the work and sent it back. I critiqued it, gave detailed feedback, and they revised. In parallel, I evaluated if I could replicate the work I did manually with AI agents.

The feedback from that first cohort was unanimous: this felt different from anything they'd experienced in their education. It felt like work. Real, messy, challenging work. I had my validation and went on to build the whole platform with Claude Code.

What GWEN Is Today

Finally, GWEN launched in February 2026.

When you join GWEN, you step into a simulated remote internship. It feels like starting a new job — you open a chat (think Slack), meet your team, get briefed on a project, and start working. Your AI colleagues give you tasks with real ambiguity. You create actual work samples, receive constructive feedback, iterate, and build a portfolio of work that demonstrates what you can actually do.

It's the first version of that playground we dreamed up earlier!

Volker Breuer | Creator of GWEN
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If you're a student or career changer tired of hearing "we need someone with UX work experience" — this is for you.