Further training in Switzerland

The one route the Confederation pays for, and the long list it does not

The legal basis is Art. 56a of the Vocational and Professional Education and Training Act, which allows the Confederation to pay «persons who complete a preparatory course for a federal professional examination or advanced federal professional examination», at no more than 50 per cent of eligible course fees. The detail sits in Art. 66a to 66g of the Ordinance. This subject-oriented funding applies to examinations sat from 1 January 2018 onwards.

What matters most is the exclusions, and SERI answers them one by one in its FAQ. Study programmes at professional education institutions are excluded, because the cantons already fund them through an intercantonal agreement, and so are the post-diploma programmes those institutions run. Bachelor's and master's degrees from universities are excluded. CAS, DAS and MAS are excluded, as are MBA and EMBA, and the reason given is a legal one: these are university continuing education products, and they are not permitted to be offered as courses preparing for federal examinations.

For anyone arriving from a country where «continuing education» is a broad category with broad subsidies, this is the point to absorb. In Switzerland the federal money is aimed at one narrow, well-defined channel. A CAS at a university of applied sciences may be an excellent thing to do; it simply does not draw on this budget, and no amount of arguing changes that.

What a federal professional examination actually is

It is not a course and not a school. It is an examination set by the relevant professional organisation, whose rules SERI approves, and it awards a title protected by law. Art. 28 para. 1 of the Act requires suitable professional experience and expertise in order to sit one. Art. 26 para. 2 sets the entry point: a Federal VET Diploma, a tertiary-level higher education qualification or an equivalent qualification.

There are two levels. The federal professional examination, whose German name is Berufsprüfung, awards a Fachausweis and is a first specialisation after initial vocational training. The advanced federal professional examination, the höhere Fachprüfung, awards a Diplom and qualifies people either as experts in their field or to run a business; where both exist in a field, the second is the higher level, and the Fachausweis is normally an admission condition for it. SERI currently counts around 260 of the first and 160 of the second.

This is the part of the Swiss system with no clean foreign equivalent, and the reason a straight translation misleads. A Fachausweis is not a certificate a training provider issues. It is closer in function to a chartered qualification: the title is protected, the syllabus is written by the industry, and the state approves the rules rather than delivering the teaching. More than twenty-seven thousand people obtain a professional education qualification in Switzerland each year.

The conditions the entitlement really hangs on

Art. 66c para. 1 of the Ordinance lists six of them and none is a formality. Your tax domicile must be in Switzerland when the examination decision is issued. The course must have been on SERI's register of preparatory courses in the year it began, and must not have begun more than seven years before that decision. Eligible fees must exceed CHF 1 000 in total. A payment confirmation from the provider must exist and must not already have been used for another application. A federal examination must have been taken. And the application must be filed within two years of the decision.

The surprising one is the combination of «a federal professional examination was taken» with the repeated phrase «pass/fail score». You must sit the examination; you need not pass it. Someone who sits and fails has the same claim to half the course fees as someone who passes. That is SERI's own published answer, not our reading of the text.

Art. 66f para. 3 limits eligible fees to the portion that directly imparts the knowledge required for the examination; travel, food and accommodation are expressly excluded. Para. 4 excludes fees already reduced under the intercantonal agreement on professional education institutions, so that nobody is subsidised twice for the same franc.

If you are a cross-border commuter, this budget is closed

SERI is explicit about it: nationality plays no role, but cross-border commuters and international weekly residents do not have their tax domicile in Switzerland and therefore have no entitlement to federal contributions. The trigger is the moment the examination decision is issued, not the moment you paid the fees.

This catches a large group. Someone living in Haute-Savoie and working in Geneva, or in Baden-Württemberg and working in Basel, pays Swiss social insurance contributions and works under Swiss employment law, and is still outside this particular scheme because the criterion is tax domicile rather than employment. The same applies to an international weekly resident who keeps a tax domicile abroad.

It is worth knowing before you enrol rather than after, because the fees are normally pre-financed and reclaimed afterwards. If you are in that position, the realistic sources are your employer, the professional association behind the examination, or the country where you are tax resident.

The system barely exists in English, and the register proves it

SERI publishes its own site in four languages, and the coverage is not equal. Its German site map lists 352 pages, the French one 344 and the Italian one 341; the English one lists 176. There is no English page on the federal contributions to preparatory courses at all, and no English version of the FAQ that spells out the conditions quoted above. On its English professional education page, SERI marks its own lists of qualifications «(de, fr, it)».

The law is better served than the guidance. Both the Act and the Ordinance exist in an English translation on Fedlex, which is where the official English terms in this answer come from. But the amendment of 19 December 2025 that introduces the «Professional Bachelor» and «Professional Master» suffixes from 1 October 2026 is consolidated in German, French and Italian only; the English text on Fedlex still stops at the version applicable in March 2025. The article that was written to make Swiss qualifications legible in English has, for now, no English text.

The teaching follows the same pattern. Of the preparatory courses on the federal register in 2024, 74 per cent were taught in German, 15 per cent in French, 7 per cent in several languages and 4 per cent in Italian. English accounted for 0.2 per cent. Whatever the merits of this route, it is not one you can walk in English today. From 1 October 2026 a new Art. 28 para. 1bis of the Act allows the examinations themselves to be offered in English in addition to the official languages; it does not oblige anyone to do so.

What Swiss adverts name, measured in our own index

On 30 August 2026 we searched every live advert in our index that carries a summary and counted which qualification terms appear in the title or the summary. Excluding the single largest advertiser, further training is named in 12.1 per cent of adverts, the initial vocational certificate in 9.2 per cent, a master's degree in 2.8 per cent, SAP in 2.1 per cent, a professional education institution qualification in 2.0 per cent, a bachelor's degree in 2.0 per cent, a university of applied sciences in 1.6 per cent, the federal Fachausweis in 0.65 per cent, CAS, DAS, MAS and MBA together in 0.31 per cent and the federal Diplom in 0.16 per cent.

Two things stand out. The initial vocational certificate is named about fourteen times as often as the Fachausweis, which is the qualification most further-training advice points people towards. And one named piece of software, SAP, appears more often than any single higher qualification except a master's degree. If you judge «pays off» purely by visibility in the advert text, you do not end up at a diploma.

None of that means a Fachausweis is worth little. It means it is asked for in a small number of fields and, in those fields, asked for firmly. An advert can require a qualification without naming it, and our summaries compress the original text, so every figure here is a floor rather than a requirement rate.

In Swiss adverts, further training is usually an offer, not a requirement

Of the adverts that mention further training, 54.6 per cent mention it only as something offered, 40.3 per cent as both an offer and an expectation, and only 2.0 per cent only as a requirement. Taken together, around 95 per cent of the mentions sit in what the employer provides or supports.

That inverts the question. «Which further training pays off» assumes you will choose and pay. Swiss adverts mostly answer a different question: which further training an employer will carry. Treating the choice of qualification and the choice of employer as two separate decisions throws that away.

There is a sharp split by advert language, and it is the finding an English-speaking reader most needs. Among German-language adverts, 21.7 per cent mention further training. Among French-language ones, 5.3 per cent. Among Italian-language ones, 1.9 per cent, on a small base. Among English-language adverts, 1.3 per cent. The independent federal course register points the same way, with 74 per cent of courses in German and 0.2 per cent in English. The English-language segment of the Swiss market is largely international employers who do not describe benefits in these terms; if further training matters to you, the German-language adverts are where it is written down.

Courses during unemployment work on different rules

Unemployment insurance does not fund further training as such; it funds labour market measures. Under Art. 59 para. 2 of the Unemployment Insurance Act these are meant to improve the placement prospects of insured people who are hard to place for labour market reasons, or to develop their qualifications in line with what the labour market needs. Art. 60 para. 1 counts individual and collective courses for retraining, further training or integration among the training measures.

Two procedural rules catch people out. Art. 60 para. 3 requires anyone who wants to attend a course on their own initiative to submit a reasoned application with the necessary documents to the competent office in good time before the course begins. And under Art. 59c para. 2 it is the cantonal office that decides on individual training measures, so practice differs from canton to canton and an approval in one is not a precedent in another.

The training allowances of Art. 66a are aimed at the opposite end of the ladder from the SERI subsidy. They are available for training of at most three years, for insured people aged at least thirty who have no completed or Swiss-recognised vocational qualification, or who have serious difficulty finding work in the occupation they trained for. Para. 3 excludes anyone holding a recognised higher education or professional education qualification, and anyone who has passed a federal professional examination. The two federal budgets face in opposite directions.

Reading the Swiss dossier signal correctly

One practical consequence for applications. A Swiss recruiter reads «mit eidgenössischem Fachausweis» as a specific, verifiable statement about level and field, in the way a British reader reads a chartered designation. Writing «diploma in human resources» instead of the protected title removes exactly the information that carries weight, and the same goes for translating an HF qualification into a generic «college degree».

This is also why the title suffixes arriving on 1 October 2026 matter more than they look. Art. 44a para. 2 makes clear they may only be used together with the protected title in an official language, or as part of the simplified English translation set out in the examination rules. So the correct form will be the Swiss title plus the suffix, not the suffix on its own, and «Professional Bachelor» will not be a free-standing qualification you can claim.

In the meantime, the readable way to write it in an English-language application is the protected title as it stands, followed by a short gloss: the German or French title, then a phrase explaining that it is a federally regulated qualification at tertiary level. That is more work than writing «certified», and it is the only version a Swiss reader can check.

What «pays off» cannot mean here

We do not measure earnings. Our index holds adverts, not the pay of individuals with and without a qualification, and no return on investment can be derived from advert text. We therefore make no claim of the form «a Fachausweis is worth X per cent more».

What is checkable is narrower and, we think, more useful: which single route the Confederation co-finances and at what rate, which six conditions carry the entitlement, how much was actually paid out, and how often each qualification appears in Swiss adverts. In 2024 the Confederation paid CHF 105,5 million in these contributions, and 61 per cent of that examination year's candidates received one. That works out at roughly CHF 6 150 per person after a level-one examination and roughly CHF 7 720 after a level-two one.

The decision itself stays with you, and for a personal case the career guidance service of your canton is the office designed for it. One sequencing point to take away: because the money arrives after the examination, and because advance instalments require a very low last tax assessment, the fees normally have to be pre-financed. The Confederation only refunds fees that were invoiced to the person sitting the examination and paid by them, which is worth settling with an employer before, not after.

The two questions that decide it

Swiss employment law has no chapter called “further training”. It has two provisions that together form a test, and that test is the real answer.

The first question is about time. Art. 13 para. 4 of Ordinance 1 to the Labour Act: where an employee has to undertake further or continuing training on the employer’s instruction, or because the law requires it for their occupation, the training time counts as working time. Two triggers, both objective — an instruction, or a legal duty attached to the profession. Signing yourself up for an evening course meets neither.

The second question is about money. Art. 327a para. 1 of the Code of Obligations requires the employer to reimburse “all expenses necessarily incurred in the performance of the work”. Course fees for training the employer ordered are such expenses. Para. 3 closes the back door: “Any agreement whereby the employee must bear all or part of such necessary expenses is void.” And Art. 362 CO lists Art. 327a para. 1 among the provisions that cannot be varied to the employee’s detriment, whether by individual agreement, standard contract or collective agreement.

The practical rule follows: the more the training serves the business, the more clearly the business carries it. The more it serves your own career — a postgraduate diploma, a federal examination, a change of trade — the less the law says, and the more depends on what you agree in writing.

A note for readers looking for this rule in English

One practical warning. The Code of Obligations and the vocational training statutes are published on Fedlex with English translations; the Further Training Act and Ordinance 1 to the Labour Act are not. The sentence that decides the whole question — the one assigning responsibility to the individual — exists officially only in German, French and Italian.

That matters more than it sounds. English-language guidance about “Swiss training entitlements” is usually written from an American or British frame in which employer-funded development is a benefits question. In Switzerland it is a question of who gave the instruction, and the answer changes with it. Where this page quotes a rule, it quotes the language version that is actually binding.

The same asymmetry runs through every statute on this page. Of the ones quoted here, only the Code of Obligations and the Vocational and Professional Education and Training Act carry an English version in the consolidation currently in force. The Labour Act, Ordinance 1, the Further Training Act, the Medical Professions Act, the Health Professions Act, the Chauffeur Licensing Ordinance, the Federal Personnel Ordinance and the Direct Federal Tax Act exist in German, French and Italian only — checked one by one on Fedlex on 31 August 2026. Every English rendering below is therefore ours, and the German, French or Italian text is what governs.

Which occupations carry a statutory training duty — and where the rule stops

The second trigger in Art. 13 para. 4 of Ordinance 1 to the Labour Act — training required «von Gesetzes wegen», by law, because of the occupation — sounds abstract. For several occupations it is the whole answer, so it is worth checking against the statutes that actually impose such a duty rather than assuming one exists.

Road transport states it most sharply. The Chauffeur Licensing Ordinance (Chauffeurzulassungsverordnung, CZV) provides in Art. 16 para. 1 that anyone wanting to renew the certificate of professional competence for passenger or goods transport must complete «the prescribed further training» at a recognised training centre within the five years before it expires. Art. 18 para. 1 puts a number on it: 35 hours. Art. 9 supplies the consequence — the certificate is valid for five years and is renewed only on proof of attendance. A single course must run at least seven hours excluding breaks, of which at most three may be e-learning.

In healthcare the duty sits on the person rather than on a document. Art. 40 let. b of the Medical Professions Act binds anyone practising a university medical profession under their own professional responsibility: they are to deepen, broaden and improve their professional knowledge, abilities and skills through lifelong continuing education, in the interest of quality assurance. Art. 16 let. b of the Health Professions Act says the same, more briefly, for the health professions taught at universities of applied sciences: they continuously deepen and broaden their competences through lifelong learning. Neither names hours or a deadline — the duty becomes measurable only through the professional societies and cantonal supervision.

The counter-example matters as much. The Lawyers Act lists the professional rules in Art. 12 from let. a to let. j, from careful practice to notifying changes in the register — and a continuing-education duty is not among them. Where Swiss lawyers must train, that follows from their bar association's own rules, not from federal law. «Required by law» in the sense of Ordinance 1 is therefore not the same as «standard in my industry», and the difference decides who carries the invoice.

The rule also has edges, and they are in the Labour Act rather than the ordinance. Under Art. 2 para. 1 let. a the Act does not apply to the administrations of the Confederation, the cantons and the communes; under Art. 3 let. d it does not apply to employees exercising a senior managerial activity, and let. e excludes teachers at private schools as well as teachers, welfare workers, educators and supervisors in institutions. For those groups the equation «training time is working time» falls away. Reimbursement under Art. 327a CO does not: it lives in the Code of Obligations and applies to every private employment contract, whether or not the Labour Act covers the business.

A pattern in our own index fits that picture without proving it. Among German-language adverts, health and care presents training as something the employer provides most often of any group, 38.2 per cent — precisely where two federal acts require lifelong continuing education. But retail and hospitality sit immediately alongside at 37.4 per cent, and no such duty exists there. The statutory duty explains at most half of the picture; labour shortage and industry custom explain the rest.

What the collective agreements actually provide

Where the statute is silent, a collective agreement can speak — and because a generally binding one (allgemeinverbindlich erklärt) applies to every employer in the industry regardless of membership, it is the most realistic source of a genuine entitlement. We read the full text of the Federal Council decrees that SECO lists for the collective agreements extended at federal level, as of 31 August 2026. Forty-six were in force. Eight of those regulate nothing but early retirement or training itself; 38 set pay and working conditions.

Of those 38, thirty-six mention further training at all. Twenty-three provide for a training contribution or an industry training fund — money that flows through the industry’s levy, not through your payslip. Six regulate continued pay during training. And paid training days in the strict sense, meaning a right to free and paid working days, appear in exactly three.

The most generous is the collective agreement for petrol-station shops. Art. 37.1, in the version extended by the Federal Council decree of 4 November 2025, gives employees whose contract has not been terminated a right to three paid working days a year for occupational and career-related further training, plus two further paid days a year for the joint commission’s own courses. The agreement for dental laboratories calls its Art. 6.6 «Bildungsurlaub» — education leave — and grants at least three paid working days a year, plus three more paid days off to prepare for and sit a federal examination. In hairdressing, three paid profession-specific training days are the counterpart to a reduced starting wage in the first two years after apprenticeship.

Two of the 46 agreements have further training as their entire subject matter: one for painting and plastering, one for joinery. Both are extended by Federal Council decree. In those trades training is industry law, not a negotiation.

Repayment clauses, shown in an official text

The follow-up question is always the same: do I have to pay it back if I resign? The Code of Obligations has no provision on this. It only draws an outer boundary — what counts as a necessary expense under Art. 327a para. 1 cannot be shifted onto the employee retroactively, because para. 3 makes such agreements void. For genuinely voluntary training there is no statutory rule at all, and the training agreement you signed is what governs.

What such a clause looks like can, unusually, be read in an officially published text. The collective agreement for Swiss dental laboratories, extended by Federal Council decree and printed in the Federal Gazette, states in Art. 6.6 para. 1 that if the employee terminates the employment relationship, the employer may deduct from their salary the course days granted in the six months before notice was given, and reclaim any course fees paid for those days.

Two features of that clause recur in company-level agreements: a limited look-back period rather than an open-ended tie, and a trigger that only fires when the employee resigns. Whether a particular clause in your own contract is enforceable depends on how it is drafted and is a question for individual advice, not for an overview page.

Temporary work: the fund pays, not the client company

If you work through a staffing agency (Temporärarbeit), no single assignment lasts long enough for anyone to invest in you. Swiss law builds around that. Art. 20 para. 1 of the Recruitment Act (Arbeitsvermittlungsgesetz) provides that where a generally binding collective agreement requires a mandatory contribution to further-training and enforcement costs, those provisions apply to the staffing agency too, with contributions payable pro rata to the length of the assignment.

The collective agreement for staffing implements this through a fund called temptraining, which publishes concrete figures. Eighty-eight hours of temporary work in the past twelve months earns a training credit of CHF 440; every further hour worked adds CHF 5 to the account, at that increased rate since 1 July 2026. Within twelve months the account can reach CHF 5000 for training, alongside up to CHF 2250 in compensation for lost wages — CHF 250 per course day, CHF 125 per half-day — and up to CHF 300 for meals, travel and accommodation.

For a whole category of workers, this converts a “no” into a “yes from somewhere else”. The client company does not pay; an industry fund does, and the agency has to feed it.

In the public sector the answer is written down — repayment deadlines included

Federal employees have the clearest written answer to this question anywhere in Swiss law, and it is not the same as the one in a private contract. The Federal Personnel Act requires federal employers, in Art. 4 para. 2 let. b, to take suitable measures for the personal and professional development, the education and further training and the motivation of their staff, and for their broad deployability.

Art. 4 of the Federal Personnel Ordinance spells that out, and para. 4 draws exactly the distinction that private law only produces through the interplay of two statutes: the employer bears the costs of needs-based (bedarfsorientierte) education and further training and makes the necessary time available; it may cover the costs of interest-based (bedürfnisorientierte) training in whole or in part and may grant time for it. Needs-based means required by the job — then the Confederation carries both cost and time. Interest-based means driven by your own wish — then it may, but need not.

Para. 4bis even allows costs of needs-based training begun or completed before the employment started to be taken over, once the probation period has been passed. And para. 5 states plainly what private training agreements usually negotiate and rarely publish: the Confederation may reclaim costs if someone breaks the training off or leaves — within two years of completion where its share was under CHF 50'000, within four years where it was CHF 50'000 or more, and not at all where the person moves without interruption to another federal administrative unit.

Those figures bind the Confederation and nobody else. Every canton and every commune has its own personnel law with its own deadlines and its own vocabulary, and since the Labour Act does not apply to those administrations in the first place, in the public sector the staff regulations are the first source to read, not the Code of Obligations. If you work for a commune, a canton, a hospital or a school, start there — the federal provision only shows how precisely such a rule can be written.

The tax rule that quietly favours the employer paying

Who writes the cheque also changes the tax bill, and it changes it in favour of the employer writing it. Art. 17 para. 1bis of the Federal Direct Tax Act, in force since 1 January 2016: job-related education and training costs borne by the employer, including retraining costs, are not a taxable benefit within the meaning of para. 1, whatever their amount. There is no ceiling above which employer-funded training becomes taxable salary.

Pay for it yourself and a ceiling appears. Art. 33 para. 1 letter j allows a deduction for job-related education and training costs, retraining included, up to a total of CHF 13’000 in the version in force since 1 January 2025, provided you hold a first upper-secondary qualification or are over 20. That is the federal figure. Cantons set their own maximum deductions and they differ — check your cantonal tax act or the guidance notes that come with your return.

This is a usable argument in a conversation with a manager precisely because it is arithmetic rather than moral: the same course costs less overall when the company pays the provider directly than when it pays you the equivalent as salary.

What job adverts tell you, and what they do not

Before you apply, the advert answers the question only partly, and our own index shows exactly where it stops. Across active adverts we hold a summary for, 23.1 per cent of German-language postings describe training as something the employer offers, supports, funds or pays for. In French-language postings it is 15.3 per cent, and in English-language postings just 3.8 per cent.

The English-language gap is the interesting one, because those same adverts talk about development constantly. 45.2 per cent of English-language postings promise growth, development or advancement opportunities in some form — twelve times as often as they name training the employer provides. In German-language postings the two run almost level, 24.0 per cent against 23.1. English-language Swiss adverts are not offering less; they are describing something vaguer, and “growth opportunities” is not a thing you can ask an employer to fund.

Nor do adverts put a number on it. We searched every German-language advert mentioning further training for a franc amount, a percentage or a number of days within 45 characters of the keyword. The hit list was short enough to read by hand, and not one hit was a training budget: they were workload percentages, holiday allowances sitting next to the word, a staff discount, and job titles of people who are themselves in training. That this is not an artefact of summarising is checkable — among German-language adverts that mention holiday at all, 54.9 per cent state a number of days or weeks. Concrete figures survive. Employers simply do not publish them for training.

One word on comparability, because this page now carries two percentages about training in adverts. Ours covers German-language adverts only and measures how the advert presents training — as something the employer provides. The figure in the neighbouring question is computed across all advert languages and counts every mention. Different bases, different counting rules; both are correct and neither contradicts the other.

Two things that do not exist here

Two expectations travel badly into Switzerland. The first is statutory education leave. Neither the Code of Obligations nor Ordinance 1 to the Labour Act contains the concept at federal level. The only statutory leave connected to education is the youth leave of Art. 329e CO: up to one working week per year of service, until the age of 30, for unpaid leadership, supervisory or advisory work in extracurricular youth activities and for the training necessary for it — and unpaid, unless a contract or collective agreement provides otherwise. That is time off for voluntary youth work, not for your own career.

The second is that the training itself will be recognised. Swiss recruitment reads qualifications against Swiss frameworks: a Berufsprüfung, a höhere Fachprüfung, a CAS or MAS from a Swiss university of applied sciences. A course from abroad is not worthless, but it is worth checking against the official list of preparatory courses before you pay for it, because a course that is not on that list cannot attract the federal contribution either — the other question on this page works that through.

If you are new to the Swiss system, that list is a useful filter in itself: it tells you which providers the Confederation is willing to co-fund, which is a stronger signal than any provider’s own marketing.

Before you ask

The most useful preparation is not the wording of the request. It is classifying the training: ordered, legally required, or chosen by you. That determines whether you are talking about an entitlement or negotiating an agreement.

Then work through the sources in order: your contract and staff regulations; the collective agreement covering your employer, with its training fund; and, for a course preparing for a federal examination, the federal contribution, which runs independently of any employer and which the other question on this page sets out in full. If you are out of work, it is your cantonal office rather than an employer that decides on a training measure — that is set out there too. If you work through a staffing agency, the industry fund comes before all of that.

For an assessment of your own situation, the right addresses are your trade union, the joint commission of your industry, a legal advice service or the cantonal labour inspectorate. This page explains the rules; it does not tell you what to do.