TL;DR
- Free live session, Tuesday 15 September 2026, 13:00 Madrid / 12:00 UK. About 45 minutes, with time for questions.
- Remote gateway roles are roles where the experience you already have is the qualification, rather than remote experience you have not yet had the chance to get.
- Remote Work Europe has rebuilt what it does for jobseekers around that one idea. This session is where that thinking has got to – including the parts we got wrong.
- Can’t make it live? Register anyway and we will send you the replay.
Register for the free session here
There is a catch-22 at the centre of every first remote job search
Employers want people who have worked remotely before. You cannot work remotely before somebody lets you. And so the search turns into months of applying into a void, with no way of telling which adverts were ever really open to you.
I have been on the other side of that. When I was recruiting remote teams, I could not screen for remote experience – almost nobody had any – and I often wished I could. That is the thing worth knowing: being able to demand remote experience is a luxury, and an employer only has it when the queue is long.
What a remote gateway role actually is
That idea has a name now. We call them remote gateway roles – roles where the experience you already have is the qualification, rather than remote experience you have not yet had the chance to get.
Not junior roles, and not a lowered bar. The barrier here is not seniority, it is a chicken-and-egg problem – and the experience that counts is sometimes unpaid. Caring, community work, running a household, holding a committee together. Work is work, whether or not somebody paid you for it.
How we rebuilt Remote Work Europe around it
Over the past few months this one idea has changed what we do. Our members’ jobs board flags gateway roles as a category of their own. Our employer research asks the question directly, company by company. It has changed which roles we surface, and which we leave alone.
In this session I will share where that thinking has got to, including the parts we got wrong.
- What makes a role a gateway role – the four signals we test against, and the one that overrules the other three
- How to read an advert for what it is actually asking you to prove
- Why a role can look perfect on paper and still be a waste of your evening
- Where the roles are, honestly – including the countries where there are barely any
- A look at how we have built this into the Connected jobs board, so you can see it working
The practical details
| When | Tuesday 15 September 2026 |
| Time | 13:00 Madrid · 12:00 UK · 14:00 Athens |
| Length | Around 45 minutes, including questions |
| Where | Online, and free |
| Replay | Register even if you cannot attend – we will send it to you |
Bring an advert you are unsure about, if you have one. The most useful part of these sessions is usually somebody holding up a real job posting and asking what to make of it.
Register
Who this is for
People with real working experience who have never been hired to work remotely, and cannot get past that. If you have run a team, kept a service going, handled the difficult customers, done the books or held a project together, you have the part that is hard to teach. What you are missing is the part employers keep asking for and you have never been allowed to get.
And who it is not for. If you are already working remotely and want to move, this will be too basic – our jobs board will serve you better than the session will. If you are a developer with high AI fluency, there are better routes open to you than anything I will cover here, and I will point you at one of them.
Telling people not to come is not a sales technique. The people it turns away were going to leave disappointed.
