How do I quantify my achievements?

Base, period, share

The base is the number behind the number. "Up 30 per cent" means nothing until the reader knows 30 per cent of what: from ten to thirteen processed files a week says something about your work, the same rise on a revenue line says something about the business. Leaving the base out makes a claim look larger for a moment and smaller at the first follow-up question. Writing it in gives the reader a scale they can judge for themselves, which is exactly what they are trying to do.

The period decides whether the change is remarkable at all. A turnaround time falling from five days to two over four months is a different story from the same improvement spread across six years. Month and year will do. What will not do is the passive voice: "was significantly accelerated" names neither a start nor an end, so it is an impression rather than a measurement.

The share is the part most often left out and the fastest to unravel. Almost every measurable result in a company involves several people, and the person reading knows that. So put a number on your part instead of omitting it: one of four on the project team, responsible for two of five sites, in charge of the changeover but not the decision. A quantified fragment looks smaller than the whole result and is stronger, because it is the one figure on the page nobody can qualify.

Assembled, it reads like this. Instead of "optimised processes and reduced costs": "Cut changeover time on the filling line from 45 to 20 minutes over six months, with the maintenance team; my part was the new sequence of tool changes." Instead of "contributed significantly to growth": "One of three in the internal sales team taking over quotations for French-speaking Switzerland; processing time down from eight working days to three in the first half-year." Both lines are longer. Both survive a follow-up question.

The official model has no achievements section

arbeit.swiss, the portal of the public employment service, lists what a CV usually contains: the title "CV", personal details including photograph, professional experience to date, education and training, language skills, special knowledge or activities, personal interests or hobbies, and references. There is no achievements section, no key figures, no highlights. The CV "should be complete, clear and not contain any gaps" and run to no more than three pages.

That is not a ban on numbers. It tells you where performance is documented in a Swiss application file. The same page requires that all work references are included, gapless and in chronological order, most recent first — and Art. 330a para. 1 CO says what such a reference covers: the employee may at any time request a reference "concerning the nature and the duration of the employment relationship, the quality of his work and his conduct".

The consequence is unfamiliar if you have applied mainly in the UK or the US, where the CV or resume is usually the only document in the envelope. Here an account of your performance already exists, written by your former employer, in words and almost never in figures. Your quantified line is the second version of the same story. It may be more concrete than the reference — that is the point of quantifying — and it is the one place in the file where you decide which dimension of your work becomes visible.

In practice: read your references before you set your numbers, not after. They name your function, the dates and usually the scope of your duties. What you quantify should sit inside that frame — and where a reference is thin, the quantified line matters more, because it becomes the only concrete statement about that job.

What you are not allowed to quantify

Art. 321a para. 4 CO reads: the employee "must not exploit or reveal confidential information obtained while in the employer’s service, such as manufacturing or trade secrets; he remains bound by such duty of confidentiality even after the end of the employment relationship to the extent required to safeguard the employer’s legitimate interests".

The second half of that sentence is the one that matters for a written file: the duty does not end when the job does. And a CV is not a conversation. It is forwarded, filed, kept in application portals and sometimes handed to an external search firm that also works for your former employer’s competitors. A figure mentioned once in an interview is gone afterwards; the same figure in a document stays. So the revenue of a privately held branch, a margin, a contract value or a purchase price does not belong in it, and the relative form — up by a quarter, from seven to two per cent — carries the same professional meaning.

Per-unit ratios work the same way without disclosing anything: handling time per case, objects under management, defects per batch. Anything genuinely public — a published annual report, a press release, an official register — is a different case, and if you rely on it you should be able to name the source in the interview.

A second limit is confidentiality towards third parties. Client names, patient data, case numbers for a single institution, or a project that was never public do not belong in a document sent to unknown recipients. The industry, the order of magnitude and your role are enough: "for a retailer with a branch network in German-speaking Switzerland" describes the context completely enough for anyone to judge your work.

The numbers you already own

Before hunting for figures you can no longer evidence, take the ones already written in documents you hold. Your employment contract states your Pensum. Your reference states start and end dates to the day. The Lohnausweis, the annual salary statement, states how long you were employed in that year. Diplomas and course certificates state duration and date. All of these are checkable without a single follow-up question, because the evidence travels in the same file.

Everyday work yields more figures that need nobody’s clearance and still say something about scope: how many people you trained or supervised professionally, how many sites or cantons you worked across, in how many languages — and there please as CEFR levels rather than adjectives — with which systems, on which shift pattern, over how many uninterrupted years. These are size statements rather than success claims, and they take the burden of proof off the achievement line.

Dates deserve more attention than they usually get. The English, French and Italian versions of the same arbeit.swiss page explicitly require a CV without gaps in the chronology; the German version says "complete". Dates are therefore the only numbers in a Swiss CV that carry an official expectation — and they are the first ones anybody holds against the references.

What this market quantifies, and what it never does

If you want to know the unit a labour market counts in, look at what it writes in its own shop window. We counted the unedited title lines of the open adverts on SwissJobs.app. 29.7 per cent contain a digit at all. Of those titles, 74.6 per cent carry a workload percentage, 10.7 per cent a year — nearly always the start of an apprenticeship — and the remaining 14.6 per cent something else: a level, a fixed term in months, an internal number.

An amount of money appears in 0.05 per cent of the digit-bearing titles. That is three adverts in the whole index. The words for salary or wage appear in 0.2 per cent of all titles, and then almost always as a form of employment — paid by the hour — rather than as a figure. This market does not write its prices in the window.

That yields an awkward but useful rule for a CV: the unit read here is the workload percentage, and the unit not read here is the amount. Quantifying your achievements in francs speaks a currency that appears nowhere in the advert, and runs into the confidentiality duty above as well. Quantifying them in per cent, in time, in units or in people speaks the units this side of the table already uses.

One more consequence concerns the line stating your own availability. When an advert asks for "80–100 %", the percentage is how that employer thinks about working time. A CV that answers "full-time" or "part-time" forces the reader into a conversion they should not have to make.

How a number is set in Switzerland, and how English differs

The Federal Chancellery publishes a style guide for English-language authors and translators in the federal administration, third edition 2024, and it is unusually explicit about the conversions a CV needs. English uses a decimal point where German, French and Italian use a comma. The thousands separator in English running text is a comma, and the guide prints the Swiss form with an apostrophe in one column and the English form in the other, as something to be converted rather than copied. Currency codes go before the number — "CHF 50" — and not after it, and the guide tells its translators to write CHF rather than SFr. or Fr.

Two smaller rules matter more in a CV than they look. There is no space between a figure and the per cent sign in English, while the German, French and Italian federal rules all require a fixed space — so the same workload figure is set differently depending on which language your CV is written in. And "per cent" is two words in British English, distinct from "percentage point": a conversion rate that moves from 40 to 42 per cent has risen by two percentage points and by five per cent, and using the wrong one is the quickest way to make a good result look either dishonest or trivial.

It is worth knowing how loosely these conventions are followed in practice, including officially. The English pages of arbeit.swiss print their vacancy and candidate counts with an apostrophe as the thousands separator, the Swiss form rather than the English one the Chancellery guide prescribes. Among the adverts we index, 87.4 per cent of the titles carrying a percentage glue the sign straight onto the digit; 58.9 per cent give a range rather than a single figure, far more often with a hyphen than with an en dash; 4.4 per cent repeat the per cent sign at both ends of the range, and 15.2 per cent put the whole thing in brackets.

So nobody will reject your application over a missing space. What does read as foreign is a franc amount written with a comma, and what genuinely counts is consistency inside your own document: one way of writing percentages, one way of writing dates, one way of writing spans.

Four questions your figure has to survive

First: what was it measured against? If the honest answer is "it felt like it", the figure comes out and the description stays. Second: over what period? If you can name neither start nor end, give the order of magnitude and say that it is one. Third: what was your share? Anyone who starts telling a story here has written down the team’s number rather than their own.

Fourth, and this is the question foreign advice leaves out: can you explain where the figure comes from without disclosing something covered by Art. 321a para. 4 CO? If the honest answer is no, write the relative form. It is not a compromise — it is the statement that belongs in a document you cannot recall once it has been sent.

And where no defensible figure exists for a job, none goes in. A result can rest on a named standard, a norm or a procedure that outlived you, and an invented digit does more damage than a missing one: it is the single place in the file where somebody can ask a hard question without appearing rude.