How do I check an IT CV?

Updated: 23 August 2026

In short

Check whether your CV classifies you into exactly one role family, whether the top line repeats the advert's role noun, whether the acronyms match letter for letter, whether the level is evidenced rather than asserted, and whether the language line answers what the advert asked. Across the IT adverts on SwissJobs.app, 71.3 per cent of job titles name exactly one role family, 74.7 per cent use an English role noun against 24.9 per cent in the market as a whole, and 43.3 per cent carry an upper-case acronym.

That makes an IT CV unusual. In most fields a job title describes work and the requirements sit in the body text below. In IT the title is a classification: it states the family, often the platform, and frequently the level. So checking an IT CV is not a matter of reading for tone. It is a matter of testing whether the first fifteen lines of the document produce the same classification as that one line of the advert.

The check has to be repeated per advert, and it has a deadline. Reduce Swiss IT job titles to their base form — lower case, brackets and percentage figures stripped — and a hundred adverts still yield 72.9 distinct titles. There is barely a pair of adverts a single document could answer equally well. And the median IT advert in our index is twelve days old against twenty for the market as a whole, with 21.2 per cent posted within the past week.

The nine role families Swiss IT job titles name

Share of the IT adverts analysed whose job title places the role in each family. A title can name two families; 71.3 per cent name exactly one, 12.4 per cent name two, 15.6 per cent name none unambiguously. Rolling analysis of the adverts open on SwissJobs.app, as at 23 August 2026.

Read only your top line and ask which of the nine families it puts you in. If the honest answer is two, the answer is none: 71.3 per cent of Swiss IT adverts commit to exactly one family in the title, and a CV that spreads across two loses to a specialist in each.
Copy the role noun exactly as the advert writes it. An English role noun appears in 74.7 per cent of IT titles — Engineer alone in 49.3 per cent — against 24.9 per cent across the whole market. Calling yourself a systems technician against an advert for a System Engineer is not a style choice, it is a different string of characters.
Acronyms are the sharpest test in this field: 43.3 per cent of IT titles carry an upper-case acronym, against 23.5 per cent market-wide. Write each one exactly as the advert writes it, with the expansion alongside once. Somebody searching for ICT does not find IT.
Evidence the level instead of claiming it. Senior, Lead, Head or Principal appear in 24.6 per cent of IT titles; Junior, Graduate or Trainee in 2.7 per cent. The remaining 72.9 per cent state no level at all — which means the level is read off what sits beside your roles: estate size, number of systems owned, whether you decided or executed during an incident.
Name technologies in the advert's spelling, with a year and a scale. Among the IT adverts whose description text we hold, SAP and Python each appear in 5.5 per cent, Java in 5.2, agile ways of working in 3.9, Windows, Active Directory and Microsoft 365 in 3.3, Linux in 2.9, and Azure as well as Kubernetes and Docker in 2.7 per cent each. A tools list without dates answers none of them.
Put the language line on page one. 45.2 per cent of Swiss IT adverts want German at professional level, 30.9 per cent English, and only 9.8 per cent explicitly want both; 30.8 per cent state no language requirement at all. Even among IT adverts written in English, 9.4 per cent still require professional German.
Assume the first reader is not a technical person. 43.3 per cent of IT adverts run under a company name suggesting recruitment, staffing or consultancy, against 13 per cent market-wide, and 59.8 per cent of employers with an IT advert have exactly one open.

Test one: does the document classify you into a single family?

Swiss IT titles are disciplined. 71.3 per cent name exactly one of the nine families, 12.4 per cent blend two, and 15.6 per cent name none clearly. Seven adverts in ten have therefore already decided who they are looking for before anyone reads a CV, and they expect the same decisiveness back.

The most common weakness in an IT CV is not a typo. It is breadth. A document that gives equal weight to network operations, scripting, a cloud migration and second-level support reads as a little of everything. Against an infrastructure advert it loses to somebody showing only infrastructure; against a development advert it loses to somebody showing only development. Breadth is an asset in the job and a liability in the document.

The test takes a minute. Cover everything below the first fifteen lines and ask a colleague which of the nine families you belong to. Hesitation, or two answers, means the weighting is wrong. The fix is not deleting the rest of your experience but redistributing space: the advert's family gets the lines that carry numbers, everything else gets a line that does not.

Test two: the title line — same word, same acronym

A Swiss IT job title is shorter than it feels. Strip the brackets and the median is four words, the same as the rest of the market. The four words simply come from a different vocabulary. 74.7 per cent contain an English role noun, 43.3 per cent an upper-case acronym, and 30.6 per cent a technology or platform. The most frequent platform words in titles are Security or Cyber at 10.4 per cent, Cloud and Network at 8.2 per cent each, Microsoft, M365 or Azure at 6.1, Web, Frontend or Backend at 4.7, SAP at 4.4, AI or machine learning at 4.3, and Data at 4.2 per cent.

The rule that follows is unglamorous and effective. The line above your name is not a self-description; it is a copy. If the advert says ICT System Engineer, that is what goes above your name — not IT generalist, not senior infrastructure professional. A synonym may mean the same thing to a human reader, but the first pass is done at the level of words.

Because a hundred IT adverts produce 72.9 distinct base titles, one document for every application is arithmetically hopeless. In practice: keep one master file and change two things per advert, the title line and the paragraph directly beneath it. That is two minutes of work, and it accounts for most of the difference between a document that answers an advert and one that merely exists.

Test three: the level — senior is common, junior is rare

The level distribution is lopsided. 24.6 per cent of Swiss IT titles carry a word for experience; 2.7 per cent carry one for entry. Nine times as many adverts explicitly want the top of the range as explicitly want the bottom. That is not an invitation to inflate your title. It is the reason the level has to be provable.

For the 72.9 per cent of adverts with no level word in the title, what settles the question is the figures beside each role: how many sites or clients you supported, the order of magnitude of the estate, whether you decided or executed during an incident, whether you planned a migration or took part in one, how many people you onboarded. Each of those is one line long and replaces an adjective.

This cuts both ways for candidates arriving from larger markets. A title that outruns the evidence behind it gets tested in the first conversation, and the question is always the same: describe a decision you made on your own. Swiss IT teams are frequently small — the median employer in our index has a single IT advert open — so scope is easier to interrogate here than in an organisation with three hundred engineers.

Test four: technologies with spelling, year and scale

These figures are floors, not ceilings, and the reason matters. We hold description text for 69.6 per cent of IT adverts, and that text is a summary rather than the full advert. Within it, 32.7 per cent name at least one mainstream technology, 10.3 per cent name at least two, and 2.4 per cent name three or more. The true share is higher; the ranking still holds, because every technology is measured the same way.

In that ranking, SAP and Python lead on 5.5 per cent each, then Java on 5.2, agile ways of working on 3.9, Windows, Active Directory and Microsoft 365 on 3.3, Linux on 2.9, Azure and the Kubernetes-Docker pair on 2.7 each, React, Angular or Vue on 2.3, SQL on 1.8, C# and .NET on 1.6, JavaScript and TypeScript on 1.4. AWS, PowerShell and network kit from Cisco or Fortinet each sit near one per cent, and Google Cloud at 0.2 per cent.

Three consequences for the check. Every word the advert names must appear in your document in the same spelling, or it is not findable. Every mention needs a year and a scale, or it is not assessable — Kubernetes on its own says nothing, while Kubernetes since 2023, three production environments, on-call rota says everything. And a technology the advert does not name does not belong in your top list; it dilutes the matches rather than adding to them.

Test five: the language line, and why Zurich is not the whole country

69.2 per cent of Swiss IT adverts state a language requirement at all. 45.2 per cent want German at professional level, 30.9 per cent English, 4.4 per cent French, 1 per cent Italian. Only 9.8 per cent explicitly want German and English together, so the common belief that Swiss IT always requires both holds for roughly one advert in ten.

The national average hides a split that decides where an English-speaking candidate should apply. The Zurich region holds 28.1 per cent of all Swiss IT adverts; there 45.8 per cent want professional German and 40.1 per cent professional English, and a third of the adverts are written in English. Bern runs 59.8 per cent German against 17.1 per cent English, Aargau and Solothurn 63.7 against 13.5. Romandie inverts the picture entirely: 55 per cent want English, 24.7 per cent French, and only 4.8 per cent German. If you have no German, Zurich and Romandie are the two markets that are open to you, and they are open for different reasons.

So the test is not whether your CV mentions your languages. It is whether the level this advert names appears on your first page with evidence behind it. Evidence means a certificate with a year, or a working language with a period attached: working language English, 2021 to date, distributed team across three countries is checkable, whereas good English is not. And when an advert is written in English, still read its requirement list — 9.4 per cent of English-language IT adverts ask for professional German anyway.

Who opens your CV first, and what that changes

43.3 per cent of Swiss IT adverts appear under a company name that indicates recruitment, staffing or consultancy, against 13 per cent across the index. IT has the widest gap of any field between the name on the advert and the team you would join. A hundred IT adverts carry 26 distinct employer names, and 59.8 per cent of the employers posting one have exactly one open.

This is not a reason for suspicion; it is a requirement on legibility. The person who opens your document first is often matching words without ever having run a cluster. For that reader, every acronym needs its expansion once, every environment needs a size, and every role needs one sentence saying what the company does. The specialist in round two skips those sentences effortlessly, so nothing is lost.

There is a second effect. A document that arrives through an intermediary is frequently reused for several positions, which makes the top line more important rather than less. Without it, somebody else decides which of the nine families you get filed under, and their guess is made from whatever appears first.

What Swiss IT adverts stress — and what they ask for less than you would expect

Comparing advert texts shows where IT diverges from the rest of the market. Security and compliance vocabulary appears in 19 per cent of IT descriptions against 5.2 per cent market-wide. Automation appears in 5.8 against 2.3 per cent, troubleshooting and incident handling in 2.9 against 1.2 per cent. A CV that addresses none of those three leaves the largest measured difference on the table.

In the other direction, IT adverts mention formal education less often than the market does: degree and university vocabulary appears in 5.5 per cent of IT texts against 7.9 per cent overall, and apprenticeship qualifications in 2.5 against 6.3 per cent. The qualification is less often the gate in this field than elsewhere. It remains the place where precision is cheap and vagueness is expensive.

Precision means the official name. SERI's register of occupations lists every currently offered qualification in vocational and professional education; qualifications no longer listed stay valid, and what counts is the federal certificate or diploma actually awarded. Professional qualifications awarded by federal examination come with a diploma supplement, and SERI issues one retrospectively for CHF 80 where the qualification is referenced to the national qualifications framework and the holder is entitled to the protected title. For anyone whose CV will be read outside Switzerland, that supplement is a stronger translation of a Swiss qualification than any wording you could invent.

The ten-minute pass, in order

Take one advert and work downwards. Minutes one and two: decide the family and copy the title line. Minutes three and four: find every acronym and platform word in the advert and make sure each appears in your document in the same spelling. Minutes five and six: attach a year and a scale to each technology you kept. Minutes seven and eight: evidence the level with one figure per role. Minutes nine and ten: language line, workload and earliest start date, all in the header.

Workload and start date get forgotten in IT because the adverts rarely raise them: only 11 per cent of IT titles state a percentage against 22 per cent market-wide, and just 2.1 per cent of IT adverts are advertised as part-time. If you want anything other than a full-time contract, your header is the only place that will say so, and saying it late costs an interview slot rather than winning one.

The reason for the ten-minute limit is the clock. IT adverts run at a median age of twelve days against twenty across the market, and 54.3 per cent of them are at most a fortnight old against 36.4 per cent market-wide. A document polished for three days meets a process already in motion. Ten minutes per advert, spent inside the first third of its life, is a better use of the same hour.

Market figures come from the rolling analysis of the adverts open on SwissJobs.app, as at 23 August 2026. An advert counts as IT when its job title carries an IT designation — among others software, developer, Entwickler, Informatik, IT, ICT, system engineer, network, security, cyber, cloud, DevOps, SRE, data engineer, data scientist, database, SAP, architect, frontend, backend, full stack, test and QA roles, service desk, system administration, Scrum Master, Product Owner, and the French and Italian equivalents développeur, informatique, ingénieur logiciel, sviluppatore and tecnico informatico; titles where those words carry another meaning were excluded. Title-level figures cover every advert identified this way. Figures on named technologies cover only those IT adverts for which we hold description text — 69.6 per cent — and that text is a summary rather than the complete advert, so those shares are lower bounds. Statements about title uniqueness use normalised titles: lower case, with brackets, workload percentages and gender tags removed. Regions were assigned from the place name in the advert. Advert age is measured from the posting date recorded in the advert. We publish shares, never absolute index sizes. The statements on the register of occupations, the diploma supplement and the national qualifications framework come from the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation.

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Sources

What our job index says about the Swiss market

Computed live from our own index, not quoted from a study. Shares only, as of today.

Language the advert is written in

Deutsch: 60%
English: 23%
Français: 13%
Italiano: 3%

Of adverts that state a language requirement, the share asking for

Deutsch: 70%
English: 43%
Français: 21%
Italiano: 3%

19% posted in the last 7 days · Largest markets: Zürich 18% · Bern 10% · Genève 5% · Basel 5%