How does a trial day work?

First, the vocabulary — because you will not be invited to a "trial day"

Three German words, two French ones and one Italian one all become "trial day" in English, and they are not synonyms. A Schnuppertag or Schnupperlehre is an orientation placement for a school pupil choosing a trade; in French that is a stage d’orientation, in Italian a stage d’orientamento. A Probetag, Probearbeit or Probeeinsatz is the adult version, arranged as part of a selection process. An Eignungsabklärung am Arbeitsplatz — literally an aptitude assessment at the workplace — is the term the unemployment-insurance ordinance uses for the same thing. And an Arbeitsversuch is a placement organised by the disability insurance, which looks like a very long trial but is legally the opposite of one.

This matters more for an English-speaking reader than for anyone else, because the mistranslation runs in the direction that costs you. If you read "Schnupperlehre" as "trial day" and accept, you have agreed to something designed for a fifteen-year-old choosing a trade, with its own hour limits and its own insurance rule. If you read "Probeeinsatz" as "informal visit", you may be doing paid work without knowing it.

Nothing in the invitation will disambiguate this for you. Ask which of them it is, in the language the invitation was written in, and the rest of this page tells you what follows from the answer.

The adult trial shift: what Art. 320 actually does

Art. 320 para. 1 of the Code of Obligations states that, except where the law provides otherwise, the individual employment contract is not subject to any specific formal requirement. Swiss employment contracts are not created by signature. Para. 2 goes further: the contract is deemed concluded where the employer accepts work over a certain period which in the circumstances could reasonably be expected only in exchange for salary. Intention does not enter into it. What enters into it is the character of the work, its duration, how independently you performed it, and whether the business would have needed somebody else there had you not come.

The third paragraph is the one almost nobody quotes and the one that matters most on a trial day. Where an employee performs work in good faith for the employer under a contract which is subsequently found to be invalid, both parties must discharge their obligations under the employment relationship as if the contract had been valid, until one party terminates the relationship on grounds of that invalidity. In other words, a day that turns out to have rested on an unenforceable arrangement is still treated as employment for the time actually worked. The day cannot be retroactively reclassified into nothing.

None of this tells you the amount. What a salary would be is governed by Art. 322, which points to what was agreed, what is customary, or what a standard or collective employment contract prescribes. In sectors covered by a collective agreement — hospitality, construction, retail in several cantons — that agreement is the first place to look, not the last.

The Schnupperlehre: the only version an ordinance regulates by name

Switzerland has a young-workers ordinance, and it contains the sentence that answers most parents’ question. For young people over 13 who are still in compulsory schooling, maximum working time is three hours a day and nine hours a week during term. During half the school holidays, or during a Berufswahlpraktikum — a career-choice placement, the ordinance’s own name for a Schnupperlehre — it is eight hours a day and 40 hours a week, between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., with a break of at least half an hour for any stretch longer than five hours. And then: the duration of a single career-choice placement is limited to two weeks.

Two weeks is a hard ceiling for that age group, and it is written in an ordinance you can read in three languages but not in English. The frame around it is in the Labour Act itself: young people are employees of either sex up to their completed eighteenth year, the employer must have due regard for their health and must in particular ensure that they are not overworked, and as a rule nobody may be employed before their completed fifteenth year.

There is also a rule that runs the other way from what most people assume. The ordinance bans dangerous work for young people, with narrow exceptions for formal apprenticeship training and for supervised integration measures. Since April 2024 it states expressly that Schnupperlehren are not integration measures or preparation for basic vocational training — the general ban applies. A pupil on a taster placement is therefore more restricted around dangerous work than an apprentice in their first year, not less.

Accident insurance without a contract and without pay

The question an arriving reader asks first, because it is the one with no obvious answer: if there is no contract and no salary, who covers you if something happens in the workshop or the kitchen?

The accident-insurance ordinance answers it in an article titled "compulsory insurance in special cases". Its first paragraph reads: persons pursuing an activity at an employer in order to prepare for their choice of occupation are also compulsorily insured. The word "also" is doing the work. It places the taster candidate alongside employees without requiring them to be one — no salary, no contract, no social-insurance registration needed. The provision has been in force since January 1998.

For the adult trial shift the route is different but not open-ended: if Art. 320 para. 2 has produced an employment relationship, you are an employee, and compulsory accident cover follows from that. Which is one more reason to settle in advance which of the two situations you are in.

The one trial that is legally not employment

Art. 18a of the Federal Act on Invalidity Insurance allows the insurance to assign an insured person a workplace on a trial basis for at most 180 days, in order to establish their actual capacity in the labour market. During the trial the person is entitled to a daily allowance, and anyone drawing a pension continues to draw it.

Then comes a sentence that had to be written down precisely because it contradicts everything above: during the trial placement, no employment relationship under the Code of Obligations arises. To stop that from leaving the person unprotected, the article lists eleven lettered groups of employment-law provisions that apply by analogy: duty of care and loyalty; accounting and restitution; overtime; compliance with instructions; employee liability; tools, materials and expenses; protection of personality; free time and holidays; other obligations, meaning the security deposit, the reference and the duty to inform; rights to inventions and designs; and what becomes of claims when it ends.

That list is the clearest thing in Swiss law about what a trial placement is. The legislature once, for one case, wrote out exactly which obligations travel with someone who works in a business without being employed by it. For the ordinary trial day no such list exists, which is why the all-or-nothing question of Art. 320 is what decides it instead.

If you are registered with the RAV

The unemployment-insurance ordinance names the trial day in a place nobody looks. Its article on easing the counselling and monitoring obligation provides that, on request, the competent office rules that an insured person is released for at most three weeks from counselling and monitoring interviews where they must travel abroad for a job interview, complete a Schnupperlehre, or undergo an aptitude assessment at the workplace.

Two details are worth holding on to. The ordinance recognises the adult trial shift under the name Eignungsabklärung am Arbeitsplatz — the thing exists in the rules, the English phrase does not. And the release happens "on request": it is not a consequence of attending, it is something applied for beforehand. If a placement runs over several days, that conversation with your advisor belongs before it starts.

What Swiss adverts say about trial days — and what they never say

We searched every live advert in our index that carries a summary for any mention of a trial arrangement, in all four languages and with every common wording. The result was sharper than we expected. Every single advert that mentions one uses a German word built on schnuppern: half say Schnupperlehre, just over four in ten say Schnuppertag, and a small remainder use another schnupper form.

The other half of the count is the striking one. Not one advert in the index uses Probetag, Probearbeit or Probeeinsatz. Not one French-language advert says journée d’essai or stage d’observation, although roughly an eighth of the index is written in French. Not one Italian-language advert mentions a giornata di prova. And not one English-language advert mentions a trial day, a trial shift or a working interview — even though English is the second-largest advert language in our index after German, at more than a quarter of it.

For a reader arriving from outside Switzerland that is the practical finding on this page. The English phrase you would search for does not appear in the Swiss job market’s own written language at all. Two thirds of the adverts that do mention a trial are apprenticeship adverts. The adult trial shift, the thing this question is usually about, is never advertised: it is arranged by phone or in the invitation email, verbally, at short notice, and without anything on paper saying which of the four arrangements it is.

And the last count is the one that decides how you should behave: not one of those adverts says whether the day is paid or whether expenses are covered. If nobody writes it down, asking is not rudeness. It is the only channel the information has.

A trial day is not a probation period

English blurs these two more than German does, and they sit at opposite ends of the same process. The probation period under Art. 335b begins once the contract is running: during it either party may terminate at any time on seven days’ notice, and the probation period is considered to be the first month of the employment relationship. A written agreement, a standard employment contract or a collective agreement may vary that, but it may not exceed three months.

The trial day comes before all of it and decides whether there is a contract at all. If your counterpart says "probation" and means "trial day", you are answering a different question from the one you asked.