How many Swiss jobs can you actually do in English?

That is the strict answer: jobs where English is enough on its own. Widen the question to "jobs that do not require German" and the number rises to 6,466, or 37% — those include roles in French-speaking Switzerland where French is the working language instead.

Both numbers are larger than the pessimists claim and much smaller than the international-Switzerland story suggests. One in five is a real market. It is also four in five that are closed to you, which is why the location of that one in five matters more than its size.

A note on what "require" means here. We count a language as required when the posting asks for it at professional or native level. Languages listed as an advantage, or at conversational level alongside a working language, are not counted — an advert asking for fluent German and conversational English is a German-speaking job.

This is the finding that should change how you search. The national average of 21% hides a spread from 48% to 7%, and that spread is far wider than the difference between industries.

Geneva leads at 48%, which surprises people who assume the French-speaking cantons are hardest without French. It is the international organisations: the UN, the NGOs and the multinationals headquartered there recruit in English by default. Zurich follows at 47% on much larger volume — 962 English-workable postings against Geneva's 373 — and Zug at 46% on the strength of its commodity traders and holding companies.

Then it falls away sharply. Basel is 26%, held up by pharma. Bern, despite being the federal capital, is 10%. Lucerne and St. Gallen are 8%, Graubünden 7%. In those cantons the German-speaking labour market is the labour market, and no amount of searching changes that.

The practical consequence: if you are job-hunting from abroad without German, three cantons hold most of what is open to you. Searching nationally mostly produces jobs you cannot apply for.

This is the trap that wastes the most time. A posting written in English feels like an invitation, and on a job board that filters by advert language it will be presented as one. But the advert is a recruiting document, and large Swiss employers write in English because they hire internationally — not because the team works in English.

We measured this directly. Of the postings whose text is written in English, more than a fifth name German at a working standard somewhere in the requirements. Apply to those and you are competing for a German-speaking role with a CV that says you do not speak German.

It is the reason our own English-speaking pages filter on what the posting requires rather than what language it is written in. The two answers differ by a factor of more than two, and the difference is entirely made up of applications that were never going to succeed.

If you are learning German in the hope that partial fluency opens the market, this is the number to weigh. Swiss employers overwhelmingly ask for German they can work in — C1 in CEFR terms, or the wording "verhandlungssicher", negotiation-proof.

Only 5% of postings that mention German will take conversational German, and 310 want native-level. There is very little middle ground: the jump from "no German" to "employable in German" is close to the jump from A2 to C1, and the market prices it that way.

The implication is not that learning German is pointless — it opens 11,106 postings, three times what English alone reaches. It is that a year of evening classes does not open a third of them. Until German is at working level, the 3,747 English-workable postings are the realistic market, and they are concentrated in the three cantons above.

The concentration is worth knowing before you spread applications thinly. A handful of employers — sportswear, pharma, private banking, the research institutions and the Big Four — produce a large share of everything open to an English speaker in Switzerland.

They fall into two recognisable types. Companies international from the start, like On Running and CERN, work in English by default. Pharma and finance — Roche, Union Bancaire Privée, Vontobel, Julius Bär, PwC — run English as the corporate language while the canton around them works in German, and that is exactly where the earlier trap lives: an English advert from a Zurich bank may still want German for client-facing work.

The flow is steadier than the totals suggest. 715 of the 3,865 English-workable postings we hold were published in the last seven days, so about one in five is under a week old. This is a market that refreshes rather than a backlog you exhaust in a fortnight.

The English-workable share is not spread evenly across occupations either. Engineering roles carry the largest count by a distance, followed by general management, technical specialists and software. Research is strong for the same reason as Geneva: the institutions are international by design.

At the other end, the roles that involve talking to the Swiss public all day are effectively closed. Nursing has essentially no English-workable openings in our inventory, and that is correct rather than a gap in the data — you cannot nurse a German-speaking patient in English. Retail, care work and customer service behave the same way.

This is worth internalising before you retrain. The advice "go into healthcare, they are desperate" is true about demand and false about access: the shortage is real and the language requirement is absolute.