How do I write a cover letter after parental leave in Switzerland?
Updated:
In short
Give a percentage and a date, not an explanation. Swiss maternity and paternity leave run inside the employment relationship, so in most cases there is no gap to justify. What is genuinely open is the workload you are coming back on and the day you can start. Put both in one sentence, in the last third of the letter. That sentence carries the one fact nobody else has: 78.1 per cent of the adverts we hold a description for state no percentage anywhere.
Two versions of this letter circulate, and both miss. The first spends half a page on the break — how long, why, how well the childcare is arranged — and arrives at the actual job in the closing line. The second says nothing at all, offers neither a date nor a figure, and leaves the reader to reconstruct both. One letter is about you, the other is about nothing. Each withholds the same thing: something the employer can plan around.
If you apply in English in Switzerland, that withholding is expensive, because your segment of the market is the quietest one on the subject. Among the English-language adverts in our index, only 8.2 per cent state a workload in the title at all, against 29.2 per cent of the German-language ones. Where an English-language advert does state one, 35.9 per cent insist on a flat 100 per cent and only 7.1 per cent reach down to 60 per cent or below. The number will not appear unless you write it.
Shares of the English-language adverts in our index that state a workload in the title. Ongoing analysis, August 2026; the remaining English-language adverts name none. Ranges count by their lower bound; rounding applies.
- One sentence: a figure and a date. «I am returning at 80 per cent and can start on 1 November.» That settles the part only you can answer. Which days, how much home office, how holidays fall — all of that belongs in the conversation, not in the letter.
- Put the sentence late, not first. It belongs in the paragraph where you are already talking about your start date, usually the second to last. At the top of the page, the identical wording turns your workload into the headline of your application instead of a condition attached to a good argument.
- Take the floor the advert already printed. Where a band is advertised, 80 to 100 per cent is by far the most common one, and it accounts for half of all English-language adverts that name a workload. Applying at 80 against that band is not a request, it is an acceptance. You only negotiate when your figure sits below the printed floor.
- Family responsibilities are a legal category here, not an excuse. Article 36 of the Swiss Labour Act carries the heading «workers with family responsibilities» and defines them as raising children up to the age of fifteen and caring for relatives or close persons who need care. Employers must take particular account of them when setting working and rest hours.
- Do not promise unlimited availability. Article 321c of the Code of Obligations obliges you to work extra hours only so far as you are able to and can be expected to in good faith; Article 36 paragraph 2 of the Labour Act additionally requires your consent before workers with family responsibilities are assigned statutory overtime. A single eager sentence in a letter can only weaken that position.
- Your childcare arrangement is not evidence. Writing that the children are «reliably looked after» answers a question that has no business in a selection procedure, and raises it in the process. One clause about availability is enough: which days, from when, done.
- Do not offer job sharing first. The term appears in 0.04 per cent of the adverts we hold a description for — it is effectively absent from Swiss advert copy. Proposing it in a cover letter asks the reader for an arrangement their organisation usually has no internal form for.
What is actually open after a family break
Start with an inventory, because it is shorter than most people expect. Swiss maternity leave and the other parent's leave are both taken while the contract runs on. If you drew them and went back to the same desk, you were continuously employed and there is no hole in the file at all. A letter that explains something invisible manufactures the very problem it was written to solve.
The picture only changes if you were away longer than the paid leave — unpaid leave on top, a reduced workload, or a job given up entirely. Even then the letter is not where the chronology goes. Dates belong on the CV, in the same column as every other entry, formatted the same way. The letter does a different job: it says what happens next.
What happens next has exactly two components. The first is the workload you re-enter on, which after a family break is rarely the one you left on. The second is the date you are free. Both are plannable, both matter to the reader immediately, and only you know them. Everything else in the letter is an argument for the role, not a bulletin about your circumstances.
That is what separates this letter from one written after a dismissal or an illness. Those involve an event, and an event earns one line of factual reporting. A family break usually involves no event at all — it leaves behind a condition, expressed as a percentage. Miss that distinction and you write an apology into a situation that never called for one.
Why nobody prints the number you need
The Swiss market is remarkably silent on workload. Of the adverts in our index that we hold a description for, 78.1 per cent contain no percentage anywhere — not in the title, not in the body. No «full-time», no «part-time possible», no range. In more than three out of four postings the workload is not advertised at all; it is assumed.
What gets assumed, absent anything else, is a full week. That is precisely why your sentence is information rather than an imposition: it replaces a silent assumption with a figure. Raise it in the third interview instead and you will have run three meetings on a premise that was never true, with the process at risk of collapsing over something a subordinate clause could have settled at the start.
Where a figure does appear, it is more open than its reputation. Across the whole index 21.9 per cent of adverts name a workload, and 16.2 per cent of all adverts — three quarters of those that name one — explicitly advertise a floor below 100 per cent. The median floor across the market sits at 80 per cent. Part-time is not a favour being granted; in a sixth of all postings it is the published starting point.
One phrase deserves a warning. «By arrangement» appears in only 0.7 per cent of the titles that carry a percentage, and in most of those it attaches to the start date rather than to the workload. If you are waiting for an advert to signal that the percentage is negotiable, you are waiting for wording that Swiss advert copy barely uses.
The sentence: a figure, a date, one clause
The usable version has three parts and no more. First the figure: «80 per cent», not «a reduced workload». Second the date: «from 1 November», not «by arrangement». Third, and only where the role genuinely turns on it, one clause about when those hours fall: «on fixed days, Monday to Thursday». Anything beyond that weakens the letter rather than strengthening it.
The most common failure in this sentence is the conditional. «Ideally I could envisage something in the region of 80 per cent» contains three hedges and no commitment. The reader cannot plan against it, and reads the hedging as room to move in both directions. «I am returning at 80 per cent» is shorter, firmer, and every bit as open to discussion afterwards.
The second failure is the reason. «Since our daughter does not start school until the summer, 60 per cent would suit me» ties your figure to a circumstance that will change — and hands over an argument for revisiting the figure the moment it does. Numbers need no justification. «60 per cent, from 1 March» stands perfectly well on its own.
That leaves the case where your figure sits below the advertised floor. Then one addition belongs in the sentence, and it is arithmetic rather than enthusiasm: what fits inside the hours you are offering. «60 per cent across four days, including the month-end close» answers the question that sits behind every floor — whether the work fits in the time — instead of insisting that you are hard-working.
Where a reduced workload is genuinely advertised
Whether your sentence lands well depends less on your phrasing than on who receives it, and the differences between fields are large enough to read straight off the advert titles. In nursing and healthcare 53.7 per cent of postings state a workload — the highest of any field we counted — and the median floor there is 60 per cent, with more than half of those postings reaching 60 per cent or lower.
Software and engineering sit at the other end. Only 9.1 per cent of those postings name a workload, and of those just 4.9 per cent go to 60 per cent or below. That does not mean nobody works reduced hours in Swiss tech; it means the advert says nothing, so your sentence is the first mention of the subject in the process. That is an argument for putting it in early and plainly rather than saving it up.
The commercial fields sit in between: 36.0 per cent of administrative and clerical postings name a workload, 26.0 per cent in fiduciary and finance, 22.3 per cent in retail, and the median floor in all three is 80 per cent. Coming back at 80 per cent in those fields is the advertised norm rather than a special case, which is worth knowing before you talk yourself into asking for less.
There is also a language effect, and for anyone applying in English it is the practical one. German-language adverts flag part-time work in 7.7 per cent of cases; English-language adverts do so in 1.7 per cent. If your German is good enough to apply in it, the German-language half of the market is measurably more explicit about workload — and an explicit floor is easier to accept than an unstated assumption is to change.
What Swiss law already settles for you
The Labour Act treats your situation as its own category, which is worth more in a letter than any assurance you could write. The relevant section is headed «workers with family responsibilities», and Article 36 paragraph 1 defines those as raising children up to the age of fifteen and caring for relatives or close persons who require care. Employers must take particular account of them when fixing working and rest hours. The Act is published in German, French and Italian; the wording here is a rendering of those texts.
Two concrete consequences sit right beside it. Under Article 36 paragraph 2 employees with family responsibilities may be assigned statutory overtime only with their consent, and on request must be granted a lunch break of at least one and a half hours. Neither is something to plead for, and neither needs negotiating in an application. Both apply from the first working day.
Keep that separate from the extra hours governed by Article 321c of the Code of Obligations — work beyond the hours contractually agreed. There you are obliged only so far as you are able to perform them and they can be expected of you in good faith. Both tests are elastic and both run in your favour, unless an over-eager line in your letter writes over them. «Fully flexible at all times» is exactly such a line.
For the sick-child day the same Act supplies a figure. Under Article 36 paragraph 3, on presentation of a medical certificate the employer must grant leave to care for a family member or partner whose health is impaired, limited to the time required and to a maximum of three days per occurrence; paragraph 4 caps the total at ten days a year except in the case of children. None of that belongs in the letter. All of it belongs in your head before you agree to anything at interview.
What ruins the letter
Start with the term itself. «Parental leave» describes an entitlement that Swiss employment law does not have; what exists here is maternity leave, the other parent's leave, and whatever unpaid leave was individually agreed. Used in a Swiss letter the phrase quietly asks the reader to translate. If your sentence is about a percentage and a date anyway, you need none of these words.
Then the gratitude loop. Lines like «I am very grateful for the opportunity to be allowed back into working life» rearrange the roles before the conversation has started. You are applying for a post someone needs filled; the break is a period on your CV, not a favour being extended to you. Tone does more damage here than content.
Also leave out the inventory of what you organised during the break. The parents' committee, the nursery waiting list, the grandmother on Wednesdays: that is logistics, and logistics is not an argument for a job. Something dated — a completed certificate, a mandate, a piece of contract work — reads differently, because it is denominated in the same currency as the rest of the file.
Finally, the over-extended promise of flexibility. It is striking how often the other side uses that word without filling it: 2.9 per cent of English-language adverts with a description demand flexibility, resilience or adaptability, while 0.1 per cent mention shift, weekend or on-call work at all. The demand is nearly always abstract. The strongest reply is not an equally abstract promise but your concrete statement — figure, days, date.
Market figures come from our ongoing analysis of the Swiss job adverts we have indexed, as of August 2026. Workloads are read from the advert title as written; a band such as «80–100%» counts by its lower bound. Figures about advert text refer to those postings we hold a description for, roughly three quarters of the collection — an absent term therefore means «not stated», not necessarily «not possible». We publish shares, never absolute collection sizes, and rounding applies. Legal references are to the Swiss Labour Act and the Code of Obligations as published on fedlex.admin.ch, and are not legal advice.
Sources
Related questions
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%