Am I too old to change careers in Switzerland?

The act that governs every retraining route names age once

If you retrain in Switzerland, you do it under the Berufsbildungsgesetz — the Vocational and Professional Education and Training Act, and one of the few Swiss acts that carries an official English version on Fedlex. A shortened apprenticeship, an apprenticeship alongside a job, admission straight to the final examination, a portfolio of prior learning: all of it sits under this act. It is therefore the place a maximum age would be, if there were one.

We searched all 76 articles of the consolidated text for age figures. There is exactly one, in Article 15 paragraph 3, and the official English reads: «The Federal Council shall establish the criteria whereby a minimum age for commencement of VET may be set.» A minimum, set by criteria the Federal Council determines. No ceiling on an apprenticeship, none on a qualification procedure, none on a federal examination. The conditions that do exist are about prior schooling and practical experience, not about the year you were born.

The same article contains the sentence most people arriving here would not expect a training statute to hold. Under paragraph 2 letter d, initial training is meant to build «ability and willingness to pursue lifelong learning, exercise critical judgement and reach decisions». Lifelong learning is not a slogan in a brochure here; it is in the purpose article of the stage of education most Swiss people enter at sixteen.

What the individual routes are, and which cantonal body decides whether your existing experience counts, is a separate question answered on the page about changing occupational direction. This page is about the one number people search for and do not find.

If you are arriving from abroad, the second pillar is the part with no equivalent at home

Readers who move to Switzerland mid-career usually arrive with an intuition formed somewhere else: that age discrimination in hiring is regulated by a dedicated statute, and that a pension is a single national scheme you cannot really affect. Neither maps onto Switzerland, and the mismatch is worth naming before the detail.

There is no federal act prohibiting age discrimination in private hiring. The Federal Constitution does list age in its non-discrimination provision, but that provision binds the state and reaches private parties only indirectly. If you are used to an equality act covering age, the absence is the thing to notice — not because Swiss employers behave differently, but because the legal route you might look for after a rejection does not exist in that form.

The second pillar, by contrast, is far more present in a Swiss job change than an occupational pension usually is elsewhere. It is employer-linked, it moves with you when you change jobs, its contributions rise in bands as you age, and — the point of this page — it is the one body of federal law that names an age specifically because a person is older and changing situation. An arriving reader who has never held a Vorsorgeausweis will not have been told this by any international careers guide.

One practical consequence for cross-border readers: the rules described here follow the place of work, not the place of residence. A frontalier employed in Switzerland is in the same second pillar as a colleague living in the same canton, and meets the same articles when the job changes.

The Labour Act does have a special-protection part — and it is for the young

The Arbeitsgesetz, the Swiss Labour Act governing working hours, rest and health protection, has a part headed special protection provisions. It is split by group. The first group is «Jugendliche», young workers: Articles 29 to 32. Then come pregnant women and nursing mothers, then an article on workers with family responsibilities, then a provision letting the Federal Council issue rules for further groups doing arduous or dangerous work. There is no group for older workers in that part.

All three of the act's age figures sit in the youth articles. Article 29 paragraph 1 defines young workers as those up to the completed 18th year of age. Article 30 paragraph 1 forbids employing them before the completed 15th. Article 31 attaches a rule to the completed 16th.

Article 29 paragraph 4 is the one that matters most for a question about hiring, because it is the only place in the act that puts an age duty on an employer at the point of engagement: an employer engaging young people must have proof of age presented. That duty exists once, and it runs towards the young. For an engagement in mid or later life the Labour Act imposes nothing comparable — no duty, no prohibition.

The practical reading is narrow and worth stating exactly. Change jobs at 52 and the rules on hours, rest periods and health protection are the same rules that applied at 32. In this part of the act you are not a separate category. A special provision for older workers is not something you have failed to find; it is something the legislature did not write here.

A chapter of the pension act named after its own purpose

The most striking passage is not in employment law at all. Inserted between the fifth and sixth chapters of the BVG — the Federal Act on Occupational Old Age, Survivors' and Invalidity Pension Provision — is a chapter 5a headed «Erleichterung der Arbeitsmarktbeteiligung älterer Arbeitnehmer»: facilitating the labour market participation of older employees. It was added by the Federal Act of 11 December 2009 whose own title is «measures to facilitate the labour market participation of older employees», in force since 1 January 2011. The chapter holds two articles.

The BVG has no official English version on Fedlex, so the translations here are ours and the German is what counts. Article 33a, «Weiterversicherung des bisherigen versicherten Verdienstes», lets a pension fund provide in its regulations that where an insured person's salary falls after the completed 58th year of age by at most half, the person may ask for their pension cover to continue at the previous insured salary. It addresses precisely the fear behind a late career change: a lower salary, and with it a smaller pension.

Three limits belong in the same breath, or the provision reads as a promise it is not. It is a power, not a duty: the fund may provide for it in its regulations, and if it has not, the option does not exist. It applies only where the salary falls by at most half. And contribution parity is expressly switched off for this continued cover, with employer contributions permitted only with the employer's consent — so the bill can sit entirely with you.

Paragraph 2 caps the arrangement at the regulatory reference age. The chapter's second article, 33b, concerns gainful employment after the reference age and lets a fund carry on building retirement cover until the completed 70th year of age. That, too, is an opening upwards rather than a limit.

Article 47a: what changes if the employer ends the contract after 58

The second place federal law ties an age to a change is Article 47a BVG, and its marginal note states the situation outright: leaving compulsory insurance after completion of the 58th year of age. A person who leaves the compulsory scheme after that age «because the employment relationship was terminated by the employer» may require that their cover continue, in the previous scope, with their previous pension fund.

Unlike Article 33a, this is a right of the insured person rather than a discretion of the fund. Paragraph 2 lets the person keep building retirement cover through their own contributions, and the vested benefit stays with the fund even if they stop building. Paragraph 5 puts them on the same footing as those insured in the same collective through an existing employment relationship, «in particular as regards interest, the conversion rate and payments by the former employer or a third party».

The condition is tight, and it is the detail to know before planning anything. The article requires that the employer terminated the relationship. Someone who resigns at 59 in order to move into another occupation does not, on the wording, meet it. Paragraph 7 does allow a fund to offer the same continuation from the completed 55th year of age in its regulations — again a may, not a must.

Two boundaries sit in the same article. Under paragraph 4, the continued cover ends among other things if, on joining a new fund, more than two thirds of the vested benefit is needed to buy into the new fund's full regulatory benefits. Under paragraph 6, if the continuation has lasted more than two years the benefits must be drawn as a pension, and the vested benefit can no longer be withdrawn or pledged for owner-occupied housing.

One structural detail is easy to miss and worth having. Article 49 paragraph 2 lists the provisions that apply beyond the compulsory minimum, to the supplementary cover most Swiss funds actually provide — and item 6a names Article 47a expressly, while item 1 names Articles 33a and 33b. The legislature did not leave these three to the mandatory floor alone.

The one age line in unemployment insurance that speaks to retraining

Anyone attempting the change while unemployed meets a third act. Article 65 of the Unemployment Insurance Act provides for Einarbeitungszuschüsse — induction allowances, paid where an insured person «whose placement is difficult» is brought into a firm at a reduced wage, provided the reduced wage corresponds at least to the work actually delivered and the person can expect employment on normal local and sectoral terms once the induction is over.

Note what the entry criterion is: difficulty of placement, not age. Age appears at the next step, in one direction. Article 66 paragraph 2 caps the allowances within the benefit period at six months, twelve in exceptional cases. Paragraph 2bis then says that insured persons over 50 are entitled to the allowances for up to twelve months. What is the exception for everyone else is the rule from 50.

The taper differs too. Under paragraph 3 the allowance is normally cut by a third of its initial amount after each third of the planned induction period; for insured persons over 50 the cut starts only from the month following the first half of the measure. Paragraph 4 has the allowance paid through the employer together with the agreed wage.

The other age figures in unemployment insurance — extra daily allowances shortly before the reference age, a higher maximum from the completed 55th year, training allowances from thirty, transition benefits from sixty — are set out in detail on the RAV pages in this section and are not repeated here. For this question only their direction matters, and it is the same in every case.

Where the answer stops being federal

Everything above is federal law and applies identically across all 26 cantons. Three things are not. First, if you apply to a cantonal or communal administration, the Code of Obligations does not govern the employment — that canton's own personnel law does, and whether it carries an age condition is a cantonal question with no federal answer.

Second, careers guidance is a cantonal task. What a first appointment costs, what exists for adults and how long the wait is all differ. Third, many cantons run their own subsidies towards further training, on conditions written cantonally.

So «there is no maximum age» is a statement about federal law. Whether a particular cantonal programme, a particular grant or a particular public-sector post sets an age condition has to be read where such a condition would be written: in the cantonal instrument or in the scheme's own rules.

What the law does not decide

The absence of a maximum age says nothing about how selection is done. It is not an argument that age plays no part in hiring; it is a statement about what is written down. This page deliberately gives no advice on whether to change and no estimate of your prospects.

For your own case, three routes lead somewhere and none of them is this page. Your cantonal careers guidance service for the question of which training route fits. Your pension fund for the only question that decides whether Articles 33a and 47a paragraph 7 mean anything for you: whether its regulations provide for them at all. And if you are unemployed, your RAV for everything touching the insurance.

For a dispute under employment law, a legal advice service, a legal expenses insurer or a trade union are the addresses. Note that the cantonal conciliation and court route also runs cantonally, which is one more reason the answer to «what can I do about it» is not a federal one.