How do I check a nursing CV for the Swiss market?

That is unusual. In most of the market the job title describes a task and the requirements sit further down in prose, which is why generic CV advice tells you to mine the body text for keywords. Nursing inverts it: the title carries the level, often the specialty and usually the percentage band. Two of the five fields are also matters of public record, so a recruiter can verify them without asking you — which makes silence in your CV expensive rather than neutral.

If you trained outside Switzerland, one of those fields decides everything else. Working in a regulated health profession here requires your diploma to be recognised, and the Swiss Red Cross runs that procedure. Its own published timings are a free, compulsory PreCheck with a result within four weeks at most, then a maximum of four months to a first decision once the complete application and payment are in. Put the stage you are at, with its date, into the CV. That single line is the difference between a readable dossier and a guess.

• Write the qualification, not the occupation. In Swiss nursing adverts the level is a code: HF appears in 32.7 per cent of nursing job titles and FH in 17 per cent, against 1.6 and 0.9 per cent across the whole index. Registered Nurse, RN or BSN alone leaves a Swiss reader unable to place you, so give your own award, the country, the year, and the Swiss level it has been recognised as once you have that decision.
• Check yourself in the public register before an employer does. Diplomas are entered in the health professions registers GesReg and NAREG, and the search is open to anyone by surname, first name, profession, type of qualification, registration number, GLN and canton of authorisation. The Swiss Red Cross advises searching for your own name exactly as it appears on the diploma and contacting them if nothing comes up.
• The recognition line belongs directly under the qualification, with a date: application submitted, PreCheck result, decision received, compensatory measures under way. The procedure is documented — PreCheck free and compulsory, maximum four weeks to the result, maximum four months to a first decision on a complete file — so an employer can read your date against a known timetable.
• English is not a working language in Swiss nursing. Of the nursing adverts that state a language requirement, 91.3 per cent name German and 86.4 per cent want it at professional or native level; English appears in 3.3 per cent and is the only language named in 1.2 per cent. Across the whole index, by contrast, 41.5 per cent of adverts with a language requirement name English.
• Give the level a number even though the advert does not. Only 0.6 per cent of nursing adverts cite a Common European Framework level at all; they write good German instead. The one officially stated threshold in the field comes from the Swiss Red Cross, which accepts certificates at German B2, French B2 or Italian B2 for recognition — and a certificate obtained abroad counts.
• State a percentage band, a shift line and a start date in the header. More than half of nursing job titles carry a percentage, and 65 per cent of those are bands rather than fixed figures, most often starting at 80, 60 or 40 per cent. Answering with a band of your own matches how the market writes.
• Add one documentation line per post. Care documentation, the care process or care planning appear in 13.3 per cent of nursing descriptions against 1.6 per cent across the index — eight times as often. Name the model, your role in it and the conversations you led; do not pad the CV with software you have only seen once, since only about 4 per cent of these adverts name a product at all.

Market figures come from the rolling analysis of the adverts open on SwissJobs.app, as of 23 August 2026. An advert counted as nursing when its job title carried a nursing or care designation — among others Pflegefachfrau and Pflegefachmann, Fachfrau and Fachmann Gesundheit, care assistant, care aide, long-term care, Spitex, midwife, and the French and Italian equivalents infirmier, soignant, ASSC and infermiere; titles using the German word for care in another sense, such as animal care, foot care, garden maintenance or data maintenance, were excluded. Percentages refer to all adverts identified this way; figures about language requirements refer to those nursing adverts that state one at all. Theme shares are counted on the advert descriptions available to us rather than on full advert texts, so they are a lower bound rather than an upper one. Statements about the uniqueness of job titles are based on normalised titles, with lower casing and bracketed additions, percentage figures and gender markers removed. Advert age is measured from the publication date recorded in the advert. We publish shares, never absolute index totals. Recognition timings, fees and language certificates come from the Swiss Red Cross; register details from GesReg and NAREG.