How do I check a CV after ten years at one employer?

Why almost everything reads as a foreign language after ten years

A CV written after a decade in one house is rarely too thin. It is too internal. For ten years the most precise description of your work was the one that applied inside, and inside it was correct. Someone changing department within the same firm has nothing to explain: everyone knows what «North region» is and why «Grade C» outranks «Grade B». Those words carry for ten years and stop carrying the moment the document leaves the building.

Checking it is therefore not about cutting lines or smartening the layout. It is about looking at every word and asking whether it still names anything outside your employer. It is mechanical work, it takes half an hour, and after ten years it is the only kind that changes the outcome.

The figure that gives the scale: 89.8 per cent

You might hope there is a market vocabulary to translate into. There is not. We normalised the role titles of every open advert — brackets, workload percentages and gender markers removed, everything after the first separator cut — then counted how many different employers write the same title. In the English-language adverts, 89.8 per cent of titles are used by a single employer. 69.3 per cent of adverts carry such a title. Only 12.2 per cent sit on a title shared by five or more houses.

That last number is the interesting one, because it is the highest of the four languages by a wide margin: the German-language equivalent is 4.0 per cent, the French 1.8, the Italian nil. English-language Swiss adverts are the one slice where titles do travel — and the ones that travel are Director, Manager, Senior Software Engineer, Project Manager, Account Executive. They come from multinational job architecture, not from anything Swiss.

The German-language market works the other way round. There the titles shared by the most employers are Betriebselektriker, Servicetechniker, Fachperson Gesundheit, dipl. Pflegefachperson HF, Fachfrau Gesundheit EFZ, Logistiker — names set by the federal vocational qualification system rather than by any firm. Where the state names the title, everyone writes it identically. It matters for the check: if your decade was spent in an international company, your ladder title is probably legible; if it was spent in a Swiss firm without a federal qualification behind the role, it probably is not, and the activity has to be spelled out.

What a Swiss reader expects, whatever your seniority

If you are relocating, or have lived here a while but built the CV abroad, a few Swiss conventions apply regardless of tenure and are worth confirming while you have the document open. Workload is a Pensum, stated as a percentage rather than «full-time». Language skills are stated as CEFR levels — B2, C1 — not as «fluent». If you do not hold a Swiss passport, the permit line (B, C or G) belongs in the header, because it answers a question the employer would otherwise have to ask. Arbeitszeugnisse, the written employer references, are expected as attachments; a decade in one house usually produces exactly one, which is a reason to make the dated internal rows carry what that single document will not.

One expectation to drop: the Swiss advert does not place you on a grid. No German-language advert title in our count carries a salary class or pay band, and no French-language advert text names cadre or non-cadre status. There is no national grading label to hang your title on. The title line, and only the title line, carries the positioning.

Ten years is not one row

The commonest structural mistake after long service is a single block: one employer, one title, one date range spanning ten years. It is accurate and it reads as ten years without an event. It is almost never true. In ten years there was an acquisition, a reorganisation, a system migration, a stand-in role, a widened territory, a first trainee you supervised.

So enter the employer once as a heading and the stages beneath it with their own dates. This is not embellishment: it is the same facts at the resolution at which they happened. And it answers the question a reader asks first when they see ten years — not «why so long», but «what changed in that time».

What the market asks about your history — and what it names instead

The figures are small, which is what makes them useful. Of the adverts whose text we hold — roughly four fifths of the stock — 1.4 per cent name industry experience or industry knowledge, 0.6 per cent a comparable role or environment, 0.4 per cent experience across several industries. Whether a decade in one house is too narrow is a question the advert text almost never puts.

What it does name is work. Across all adverts, 4.9 per cent mention project leadership or project experience, 3.2 per cent improving or optimising processes, and 1.3 per cent a subject-matter responsibility or being the point of contact; in the English-language adverts, 1.3 per cent mention mentoring or training colleagues. Those are the units the other side thinks in, and they are exactly the things a decade in one house produces in quantity and never writes down, because none of them ever came with a promotion.

The conversion is therefore fixed in advance: every year inside the company has to reach the page as a named piece of work or a named qualification. Those are the only two units the market prints itself. A number of years of service is not one of them.

Your next employer is a stranger

Ten years in one house builds a picture of the labour market drawn from a single firm. The stock looks different: every hundred open English-language adverts come from 28.4 different employers, and 50.9 per cent of those employers are advertising exactly one position right now. The person who reads your dossier first will most likely know neither your house nor what your internal titles mean.

It is also why your current employer’s name carries less than it feels like it does. Inside the industry everyone knows it; two industries over, nobody. So put a short factual gloss after the name — what the house does, roughly how large it is, which market it sells into. One sentence does it, and it replaces ten years of quietly assumed knowledge.

What ten years can do that a short run cannot

So far this check has been about translating, splitting and renaming — as though a decade were mainly a problem. It is also the opposite, and the second half of the work is making the advantage visible at all. Ten years is the only career shape in which the same person can testify to the before and the after. Someone with four two-year stations behind them can say what they did. You can say what changed and then stayed changed.

So find the two or three places where you saw a full cycle: a system you introduced and then ran for years; a process you altered and then held; a team you built and kept; a product range, a shift, a customer base that did not exist in that form before. Write down the year of the change and the state that followed. That is the evidence a CV made of short stints cannot supply, and it answers precisely the competence words the adverts name anyway.

It only works, though, if the two earlier steps have been done. Without dated stages the change sits inside a block that asserts ten uneventful years; without the in-house word test it is written in a language only your current employer understands. Translate, split, then evidence — in that order.