How do I write a cover letter for an internship in Switzerland?
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In short
Lead with the calendar. Say when you can start, how long you can stay and what your status is — enrolled, recently graduated, or completing a required placement — before you say anything about motivation. Swiss internship adverts run a long way ahead of the work: among the adverts in our analysis that name a starting month in the title, 75.6 per cent name a month at least three months after the posting date, and the median gap is 139 days. An application without a window forces the reader to ask, and readers rarely ask.
The reason is that an internship advert describes a slot rather than a job, and describes it thinly. In our ongoing analysis of the Swiss adverts we index, 2.9 per cent carry an internship word in the title. Of those, 10.2 per cent name a duration in months in the title, 7.2 per cent name a starting month and 18.2 per cent give a work-time percentage — fewer than the 21.9 per cent across all adverts. In the shortened advert text available to us, 16.9 per cent mention a duration at all and 4.4 per cent say anything about pay. Whatever the advert leaves open, the letter has to close.
The second difference is the experience you do not have yet. It is not replaced by enthusiasm but by something checkable: a tool, a subject, a piece of work you finished and handed in. Internship adverts name a concrete tool — Excel, SAP, Python, SQL, InDesign and the like — in 18.0 per cent of cases, against 8.0 per cent of all adverts we hold text for. That is the hook, and unlike a personality claim it can be verified in thirty seconds.
Share of internship adverts whose title carries each element, from our ongoing analysis of Swiss job adverts, 23 August 2026. Across all adverts the same elements appear in 21.9, 0.8, 3.2 and 2.5 per cent of titles respectively — the internship market is more calendar-driven, and still mostly silent.
- Open with availability, not admiration. «Available from 1 February for six months, 80 to 100 per cent» is something a manager can put in a plan. «I would be delighted to gain my first experience with you» is not.
- State your status in the first three lines. 31.7 per cent of the internship adverts we hold text for refer to studies, a university or a degree — that is the filter applied before anyone weighs your reasons.
- For the federal administration, the date on your diploma decides. Its job portal states: «Your degree must have been completed no more than 18 months prior to the start of the internship (the date on your degree certificate is decisive).» It names exceptions for maternity leave and military or civilian service, and the limit does not apply in the same way if you are still enrolled when the internship begins.
- Propose a length instead of waiting for one. The federal administration publishes its own bounds: maximum six months during a bachelor's programme, maximum twelve months after a bachelor's or master's degree, and twelve months in total across the administration.
- Name a tool and the piece of work you used it on. A concrete tool appears in internship adverts at more than twice the rate of the wider market (18.0 against 8.0 per cent of adverts with text).
- Describe something you finished, not a quality you possess. 20.7 per cent of internship adverts with text promise a project of your own and 9.8 per cent promise supervision or mentoring; both are answered by evidence that you can carry something to the end.
- Give your languages with levels. 29.5 per cent of internship adverts require two or more languages against 20.2 per cent of all adverts, and English appears in the requirements of 45.1 per cent of internship adverts against 29.9 per cent of the market.
- Do not assume English is enough in the public sector. The federal job portal lists among the things it considers important: «Good knowledge of two of the three official languages (in some cases also English).»
- Leave pay out of the opening. Only 4.4 per cent of internship adverts with text mention it. The Confederation is the exception and publishes its rates: CHF 2'875 per month during a bachelor's degree, CHF 4'020 after it and CHF 4'500 after a master's or doctorate, each stated as one twelfth and for internships in Switzerland.
- Write to employers who hire beyond internships. 81 per cent of the employers advertising an internship with us are advertising other roles at the same time, and 67.5 per cent of internship adverts come from employers with ten or more live adverts.
The advert leaves the schedule blank
For an ordinary vacancy the advert does most of the specification: title, work-time percentage, start date, requirements. An internship advert usually omits precisely the part that makes it an internship. Only 10.2 per cent of internship adverts in our analysis put a duration in months in the title. That is already high by market standards — across all adverts the figure is 0.8 per cent — and it is still a small minority. The text does not rescue it: of the internship adverts we hold a short description for, 16.9 per cent mention a duration at all.
So the first question forming in the reader's head is not «why this industry» but «does this fit the slot we have». A letter that does not answer it goes into the pile that needs a follow-up call, and among a dozen equally recent applications nobody makes that call. One sentence settles it: start date, length, work-time percentage, and whether the window can move.
Where that sentence sits matters as much as whether it exists. First paragraph, not the footer, not page two of the CV, not an attachment. Anything below the fold is read only by someone who has already decided to keep reading.
Internships are advertised months in advance
45 internship adverts in our analysis name a starting month in the title. Measured from the posting date to that month, the median distance is 139 days. For 75.6 per cent it is at least three months and for 31.1 per cent at least six. Our current stock includes adverts naming a January start, adverts naming August of the following year, a Graubündner Kantonalbank banking internship starting the following August, CSS internships for the same month, and a cantonal hospital placement whose title names September of the next year.
That lead time changes the job of the letter. You are not applying for work that lands tomorrow; you are reserving a slot in a plan the employer has already drawn up. Which is why an unfinished degree is information rather than a weakness: «bachelor's degree expected in June, available from July» is exactly the sentence that fits into a plan.
It also changes when to write. Internship adverts sit slightly longer in our stock than the rest of the market — a median age of 22 days against 20, with 11.6 per cent posted in the last seven days against 13.4 per cent overall. They stay up longer because they have to: the start is far away, and the employer is collecting a field rather than filling a gap.
In Swiss law an internship is employment
The Swiss Code of Obligations has no separate internship contract. Art. 319 para. 1 CO defines the individual employment contract as the contract by which the employee undertakes to work in the employer's service for a fixed or indefinite period and the employer undertakes to pay a wage assessed by time or by the work performed. Art. 320 para. 2 CO adds that such a contract is deemed concluded where the employer accepts, for a certain time, the performance of work which in the circumstances is only to be expected against pay. Fedlex publishes the Code in German, French and Italian; those versions are the authoritative ones.
That is an explanation, not advice. Whether a particular placement falls under those provisions depends on the facts, and personal questions belong with a legal advice centre, a union or a lawyer. What follows for the letter is narrow and useful: if an internship is normally a fixed-term employment relationship, then start date, duration and work-time percentage belong in the letter exactly as they would in any other application. They are not presumptuous; they are the subject matter.
Apprenticeships are governed separately in the same Code and are a different application entirely. A letter for an apprenticeship and a letter for an internship share only the fact that both are early-career.
The public sector publishes its checklist
Public employers are over-represented in internships: 16.7 per cent of the internship adverts in our analysis come from employers whose name points to a canton, a city, the Confederation, a university or a hospital, against 9.4 per cent across all adverts. Our current stock holds placements at Kanton Bern, Kanton Thurgau, Agroscope, SECO and several cantonal hospitals.
This is a gift to anyone writing a letter, because these employers publish the admission rules instead of testing them in an interview. The federal job portal sets out, for university internships: maximum six months during a bachelor's programme, maximum twelve months after a bachelor's or master's degree, twelve months in total, «Work-time percentage: normally 80% to 100%», and plainly: «Short-term (less than 6 months) and unpaid internships are not possible.»
So a letter to the federal administration can be written against a public checklist — diploma date, enrolment status, a window of at least six months, work-time percentage, languages with levels. Private employers hold the same checklist in the reader's head, unpublished. A letter that answers it unprompted saves that reader the first phone call, and that is most of what a cover letter can do.
What replaces experience on the page
An internship letter should neither claim experience that does not exist nor ask for indulgence. It should show a point of attachment. The most reliable one is already printed in the advert: a tool. In internship adverts with text, 18.0 per cent name a specific piece of software or equipment, against 8.0 per cent across the market. «I did the analysis in Python and SQL for a term paper on cycle counting stations; the output was a twelve-page report» takes one line and can be checked.
The second attachment is the shape of the work. 42.0 per cent of internship adverts with text mention a team, 20.7 per cent a project of your own and 9.8 per cent supervision. If you have carried a group project to completion, that is what belongs in the letter — as an event with an outcome, not as an adjective.
The third is the field. Internships do not sit where the market is largest. 21.1 per cent of internship titles fall in IT and engineering and 8.9 per cent in marketing and communication, a field that accounts for only 2.9 per cent of all advert titles. Health and social care runs the other way: 4.3 per cent of internship titles against 6.9 per cent of the market. If you are aiming at communications, the internship market is proportionally wider than the job market; if you are aiming at care, it is narrower, and the list of addresses has to be longer.
Where the internships are, and who reads the letter
Internships are distributed differently across the country than ordinary vacancies. Of the adverts we can attach to a canton, 27.8 per cent of internships are in Zurich and 18.4 per cent in Vaud, against 23.8 and 8.7 per cent of all adverts. Read as density: in Vaud one advert in fifteen is an internship (6.8 per cent), in Geneva and St. Gallen one in twenty-five (4.0 per cent), in Zurich one in twenty-seven (3.7 per cent), in Bern one in forty-five (2.2 per cent).
Language moves the same way. Among internship adverts with a recognisable advert language, 40.6 per cent are in English, 36.4 per cent in German, 21.3 per cent in French and 1.7 per cent in Italian. Measured as a share of each language group, 4.7 per cent of French-language adverts and 4.5 per cent of English-language adverts are internships, against 1.9 per cent of German-language ones. English-speaking applicants have a proportionally larger internship market than they have a job market — and the letter should still be written in the language the advert is written in.
Finally, the spread. 284 different employers advertise an internship in our analysis; the ten largest hold 26.6 per cent of the internship adverts between them, and 63 per cent of these employers have exactly one internship open. The visible programmes — Roche, Nestlé, CHANEL, On, EY, Coop — are real but they are not the market. Most addresses are filling a single slot, and they are reading for a date, a length and one thing you can already do.
Market figures come from our ongoing analysis of the Swiss job adverts we have indexed, as of 23 August 2026. An advert counts as an internship advert when its title carries an internship word (Praktikum, Praktikant, Stage, Stagiaire, Stagista, Tirocinio, internship, intern); apprenticeships and pure trainee programmes are not counted. Statements about wording refer to the advert title and to the shortened text available to us, so an absent term means «not stated», not «not possible». Lead times are computed from the posting date to the starting month named in the title and rest on the 45 adverts that carry both. Cantonal shares cover only adverts whose work location can be attached to a canton. Employers are grouped by normalised company name, so group companies advertising under a different name count separately. We publish shares, never absolute collection sizes. The Code of Obligations is authoritative in German, French and Italian only, and nothing here is legal advice; the internship conditions quoted are those published by the federal administration's job portal and apply to its own university internships, not to Swiss internships generally.
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%