A Swiss CV with no work experience — what fills the empty fields

The market also asks about experience less often than reading adverts makes it feel. Of the adverts on SwissJobs.app that carry a description, 23.6 per cent never use the word experience at all, and a further 31 per cent name it while explicitly marking it as an advantage — desirable, ideally, a plus. Together that is more than half. A fixed number of years appears in 8.1 per cent. The wall you expect to hit stands in front of one advert in eight, not in front of all of them.

And for the case where no employer sits behind any line, there is an official template. The cantonal careers-guidance service describes a CV on berufsberatung.ch in which the professional-activities block does not appear at all: title, photograph, address, personal details, schooling, languages, interests and hobbies, taster placements, references. It is written for apprenticeship applications. It is also the only official description of a CV with no employment in it — and its running order still works when school was twenty years ago.

• The top line is your current education, not an aspiration. Both official guides ask for the same order — most recent first. Someone still in school opens with the school they attend now and works backwards. That puts a checkable entry with dates and a place at the top of the page, instead of a personal summary that reads like a claim when nothing underneath supports it.
• Taster placements, internships and assignments are your experience section. berufsberatung.ch gives them a block of their own and advises listing the ones related to the occupation you are applying for, or to a neighbouring one. The placement report belongs in the attachments. If the assignment was paid employment, a legal entitlement comes with it: under Art. 330a of the Code of Obligations you may request at any time a reference covering the nature and duration of the employment. Ask for it even after a two-week internship.
• Holiday jobs and courses are officially attachments, not padding. Alongside school reports, placement reports and aptitude-test results, the careers-guidance attachment list names letters of recommendation or confirmations of holiday jobs and courses. A confirmation covering three weeks on a shop floor is therefore a document of the dossier, and in the CV a dated line like any other.
• Give evidence rather than adjectives, because that is what entry-level adverts ask for. In the adverts carrying an entry signal, words in the reliability-and-care family appear 3.4 times as often as across the whole index, willingness to learn 5.3 times as often, teamwork 1.7 times. You do not assert those three; you evidence them — a qualification finished without interruption, a course with a certificate, two years holding a role in a club.
• Independence is the word you can drop. It is the only quality checked here that appears less often in entry-level adverts than in the market at large: 3.8 against 5.6 per cent. Someone who has not worked yet gains nothing by claiming autonomous working. What is being sought at this level is somebody who looks dependable and takes instruction.
• For references, with no employer behind you the school convention beats the adult one. arbeit.swiss states that a CV normally notes that references are available on request. The careers-guidance service instead wants referees named in the CV itself, with telephone numbers, and asks you to obtain their consent first. Without employment references, the second version is the stronger one: it supplies exactly the verifiability the dossier otherwise lacks.

The market figures were counted on 22 August 2026 from the adverts active on SwissJobs.app at that moment. The shares describing experience requirements relate to the adverts for which a description is available — 74 per cent of the stock; they rest on the occurrence of stems such as experience, Erfahrung, expérience or esperienza and on how they are embedded, which undercounts adverts expressing the same thing without those words. An entry signal means a job title containing apprenticeship, Lernende, internship, Stage, Junior or Trainee, or a description addressing labour-market entrants, graduates, career changers or a first professional experience. Fields are assigned from keywords in the job title and should be read as orders of magnitude, not as official industry statistics. The comparison factors for quality words measure how often the words occur, not the requirement behind them. What a CV contains, what goes into the attachments and in which order comes from the application tips of arbeit.swiss (SECO) and from the guides of the cantonal careers-guidance service; the entitlement to a written reference comes from the Code of Obligations as published on Fedlex.