One of the main goals of global education is to develop students as global citizens working for social change, equality and justice. However, the notion of the global citizen remains a subject of debate because of its various theoretical and ideological underpinnings, as well as diverse meanings associated with it. Non-critical ways of understanding of the concept of the global citizen may result in global education perpetuating the status quo and reproducing inequalities. This paper investigates how employees of Polish nongovernmental organisations' conceptualise the notions of the global citizen and global citizenship. Qualitative analysis of 12 in-depth interviews is carried out from the perspective of critical postcolonial global education (Andreotti) and includes the typology of global citizenship proposed by Oxley and Morris. This enables me to gain insight into the interviewees' ideals of the global citizen, to identify critical and non-critical patterns of conceptualisation of the global citizen and to examine the value of global citizenship typology in the study of empirically grounded conceptions of global citizenship.