How do I show results instead of duties?

The successor test, line by line

Cover your CV so that only one line shows and ask whether the sentence describes the post or the person. «Managed accounts receivable» survives your departure intact. «Moved accounts receivable from a paper file to a digital approval route» does not — the moving ended with you, the route stayed. That is the whole definition: the action ends, the state remains.

It works in occupations with no metrics at all. «Cared for residents on a dementia ward» stays true of your successor. «Shifted the night shift's medication check to before the round rather than after it» does not, but the new order does. In a trade: «Serviced the ventilation systems» stays true; «brought the service intervals of three sites onto one calendar» does not.

Run the test on a full CV and something useful happens before you rewrite a word. Most people find two or three lines per position that pass. That is the right number. A CV in which every line claims a result reads as a brochure, and a reader who has seen a hundred dossiers recognises the shape immediately.

The duty lines are not waste. Without them nobody can tell what the job was, and in a Swiss dossier they also have to agree with the reference letters that arrive in the same folder. Keep them, keep them short, and stop asking them to do work they cannot do.

Switzerland publishes the wording — and one of the documents is in English

The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation keeps a public register of regulated occupations. On 31 August 2026 it listed 938 active entries, of which 247 are the basic vocational programmes leading to a Federal VET Diploma (EFZ / CFC / AFC) or Certificate (EBA / AFP). Every one of them has a published training plan, free to download, no account needed.

The training plans exist in German, French and Italian only. But there is a second document, and this one is issued in English by law. The Ordinance on the National Qualifications Framework for Vocational and Professional Qualifications requires in Article 4 paragraph 1 that «a standardised certificate supplement is produced for every qualification of vocational education and training», and paragraph 3 that it contain «an assignment of the qualification to a level of the qualifications framework» and «a description of the knowledge, skills and competences held by persons with the corresponding qualification». Paragraph 5 states that these supplements are made available in German, French, Italian and English.

In practice that means an official English-language paragraph describing what a holder of your Swiss qualification can do. The supplement for a Commercial Employee EFZ specialising in banking, for instance, states that holders «advise customers on securities portfolios, recommend investments, discuss retirement planning and provide guidance on mortgages and other credit-related matters for private and business clients», and that they «see to it that legal and regulatory requirements, along with internal guidelines, are continuously observed and applied».

The same document places the qualification at Level 4 of both the Swiss and the European Qualifications Framework, and says of itself that it is «free from value judgements, equivalence statements or recommendations on recognition». That is a useful sentence to have read before you quote it: the supplement explains what the qualification covers, it does not grade you.

Used properly, this is not a phrase to copy into your CV — a recruiter has read it before. It is a source of the right register. It shows you the level of specificity a Swiss reader expects, in English, without you having to invent it.

The level is graded, and the grades tell you which lines are results

The training plans go one step further: each individual objective carries a Bloom taxonomy level, K1 to K6 in the German plans, C1 to C6 in the French and Italian ones. The plan for Informatiker EFZ defines K3 as applying learned technologies and skills in varying situations, K4 as analysing a complex situation by breaking it into its elements, K5 as combining elements into a whole, and K6 as judging a situation against given criteria.

The objectives are then printed with their level attached. «a4.1: They break a whole task into smaller activities that can be estimated and assigned to a resource. (K3)» «a3.3: They compare several variants from the results and evaluate them. (K4)» «a1.4: They develop solutions to remove possible conflicts of objectives. (K5)»

As a sorting device this is remarkably clean. A K3 line is nearly always a duty — you applied an existing procedure. From K4 upward you took something apart, weighed it, decided or built it, and that leaves a state behind. Writing everything at K3 throws away half of your work; dressing a K3 activity in K6 vocabulary collapses at the first follow-up question.

One honest caveat: the levels describe the training, not you. They are a ruler and a vocabulary, not a certificate of your performance.

English-language Swiss adverts declare rank — but rank is not a result

There is a trap here specific to applying in English in Switzerland. We counted the unedited title lines of the English-language adverts open on SwissJobs.app: 65,7 per cent contain a rank or role word. Engineer appears in 17,8 per cent, Manager in 17,3, Specialist in 7,7, Lead in 6,4, Director in 4,0, Head in 3,4.

The German-language adverts in the same index behave completely differently: only 23,7 per cent name a level at all, and when they do, an English rank word (Head, Manager, Lead, Director, Chief) appears in 5,6 per cent against 1,8 per cent for the German Leiter or Leitung. The German title names the craft; the English title names the rank.

So an English-language Swiss advert invites you to state a level, and you should. But a level is not a result — it is a claim about position, and it is the single easiest thing in a CV to inflate. If your title said Manager and nobody reported to you, say what you were responsible for instead; a German-speaking reader in Zurich will read the title with more scepticism than a reader in London would.

The reverse trap catches people arriving from abroad. A CV written for a Swiss employer that leans on job titles alone gives a German-speaking reader almost nothing, because that reader is not trained to read titles as levels. The qualification and the lines under the position carry the weight.

What stands in for a number

Three kinds of evidence pass the successor test without a digit. The first is a state: something is different now and the difference can be described. «Handovers have run on a fixed form since», «the spare-parts list is now kept per machine», «offers now go out in two languages».

The second is a named criterion — the standard, guideline or internal rule the work was measured against. Swiss training plans call this «Normen und Regeln», and on the shop floor it is a hygiene guideline, a works standard, a quality specification. A line that names its criterion can be checked, because the criterion exists outside you.

The third is adoption: something you made is still being used by other people. A template, a routine, a checklist, an induction someone else has since delivered. This is the strongest of the three, because a third party confirms it without being asked.

What does not count as a result is an activity count. «Handled over two hundred customer calls» measures occupancy. It is a scale statement and it belongs in the duty line, where it usefully tells a reader the size of the operation. It simply does not answer the question.

And write in the first person about what you did, not in the plural about what the department achieved. The successor test only works when the sentence is about you; the moment the subject becomes the team, you are testing nothing.

If your qualification is not Swiss

The register covers Swiss qualifications, so if you trained abroad you will not find your own programme in it. That does not make the method useless — it makes it a translation aid. Look up the Swiss occupation closest to yours, read the objectives for the workplace column, and you have the vocabulary a Swiss reader uses for the work you already do.

It is also worth knowing what the Confederation says about the framework's purpose. The ordinance opens by stating that the framework exists to establish «national and international transparency and comparability» of vocational qualifications and thereby to promote mobility in the labour market. Whether your own qualification has been formally recognised is a separate question with its own procedure; the point here is narrower and immediately useful — the register tells you what the Swiss equivalent is expected to be able to do, and in what words.

One more asymmetry worth noting: the Vocational and Professional Education and Training Act itself has an official English version, and Article 19 paragraph 2 requires the ordinances to set «the objectives and requirements of the workplace training segment». The ordinance on the qualifications framework, by contrast, exists only in German, French and Italian — even though the supplements it mandates are published in English. If you want to read the rule rather than the document, you will be reading it in one of the three official languages.

The ten-minute pass

One: mark every line that would still be true of your successor. Those are duties. Cut them back to the three to five per position that make the job recognisable.

Two: for the unmarked lines, ask what state remained. Write the state, not the adjective praising it.

Three: open the training plan for the closest Swiss occupation and read the workplace objectives. Where your sentence matches an objective word for word, you have copied a duty; rewrite one level up if you genuinely worked there.

Four: check that every result line names an anchor — a standard, a system, a language, a period, a specification. Lines without one all sound the same and cannot be asked about.

Five: count the results per position. Two or three is right. Zero means you have written a task list; eight means you have written marketing copy.

What the formula actually asks for

Bock's own wording is stricter than the version that circulates. Every accomplishment, he wrote, should be presented as «Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y] by doing [Z]», and he spelled the four steps out: «start with an active verb, numerically measure what you accomplished, provide a baseline for comparison, and detail what you did to achieve your goal». Two of the four instructions are about the number.

His worked example makes that explicit. «Studied financial performance of companies and made investment recommendations» becomes «Improved portfolio performance by 12% ($1.2M) over one year by refining cost of capital calculations for information-poor markets and re-weighting portfolio based on resulting valuations». The dollar amount, he explains, «anticipates the reviewer's question about whether 12% is a big deal or not». The formula does not merely allow an absolute figure. It asks for one.

The same post states what a CV is for: «The sole purpose of a resume is to get you past that first screen and into an interview.» Hold on to that sentence. It matters again further down, because the first screen in Switzerland does not start with your bullet points.

The X and the Z travel. The Y needs checking

The X is the result, something that is different because you were there. It is exactly what a Swiss reader misses in a line like «Responsible for incoming goods», which says what the post was and nothing about what you did in it. Bock's rule to open on an active verb helps here, whatever the language.

The Z is the method, and in a Swiss dossier it is the most underrated part of the formula. It carries the vocabulary of the trade: the standard you worked to, the system you introduced, the procedure you changed. It is also the part a reader can cross-check against the rest of the file, because a Swiss reference assesses the work itself. Under Art. 330a of the Code of Obligations an employee may at any time request a reference covering «the nature and the duration of the employment relationship, the quality of his work and his conduct». A Z that matches what the reference describes reads as confirmed. A striking Y that the reference never mentions reads as a question.

The Y is the part to ration. The absolute amount Bock asks for is often your employer's figure rather than yours: a budget, a revenue line, a margin. Art. 321a para. 4 forbids an employee to «exploit or reveal confidential information obtained while in the employer's service», and the duty continues after the job ends to the extent the employer's legitimate interests require it. How to build a figure that survives both tests is its own question on this site, «How do I quantify my achievements?», and is not repeated here. The short version: if you could not explain the number in an interview without opening your former employer's books, leave the amount out and keep the change.

One Swiss advert in four is written in the formula's language

Of the adverts in our index whose language we could identify on 10 September 2026, 27 per cent were written in English, 56 per cent in German, 14 per cent in French and 2 per cent in Italian, with apprenticeships and internships left out. For roughly three applications in four, then, the CV that goes out is not an English document, and Bock's sentence does not survive translation as a sentence.

English carries the formula naturally because an English CV line starts with a past-tense verb. A German CV line far more often starts with a noun, «Einführung der Barcode-Erfassung im Wareneingang» rather than a verb in first position, and French and Italian lines lean the same way: «Mise en place de…», «Introduzione di…». Forced into the English word order, the line reads as translated. Used as a checklist instead (is there a result, is there a method, is there a number I own?), the formula works in all four languages.

The English quarter has its own trap. An English-language Swiss advert is not always an English-only job: of those that name a language requirement at all, 26 per cent also ask for German. A flawless XYZ line does nothing for a CV that does not state its German level where the reader looks for it.

When well-built lines still get no interviews

A question asked this week put it plainly: five months of searching, almost no interviews, a CV that lists duties and is adjusted for every job. Would XYZ fix it? It would improve the CV. On its own it would probably not change that result, because a Swiss recruiter's first pass rarely begins with the bullets.

What gets checked first is whether hiring you is straightforward: the permit, where you live, which languages you speak and how well. Then comes the chronology, meaning which employers, which titles, in which order, with or without gaps. The content of the lines comes after that. If any of the first three is missing or unclear, the reader stops before reaching the part the formula improves.

So the order of work matters. Put the permit (or «EU/EFTA citizen»), your city and canton, and each language with a CEFR level such as B2 or C1 rather than «fluent» in the top block of page one. Make sure the chronology has no unexplained gap. Only then spend the hour on XYZ, and spend it on the positions the advert is actually about.

One line, rewritten twice

Take an illustrative line from a logistics coordinator's CV: «Responsible for incoming goods and stock control.» It passes nothing, because it would be just as true of whoever holds the job next.

The US version, straight from the formula: «Reduced stock discrepancies by 60% ($240K annually) by introducing barcode scanning at goods receipt.» In a Swiss file the annual amount is an estimate of the employer's money. The reader will look for it in the Arbeitszeugnis and will not find it there, and the percentage has no base.

The Swiss version keeps all three parts but gives the Y a base and a period instead of a price tag: «Introduced barcode scanning at goods receipt with two colleagues from IT; deliveries are now booked against the order on arrival, and differences at the annual stocktake fell from about one line in twenty to one in a hundred between the 2024 and 2025 counts.» It is longer, and every element in it is either yours, checkable, or both. The Z names a procedure the Arbeitszeugnis very probably describes as well.

In a German-language application the same line would open «Einführung der Barcode-Erfassung im Wareneingang» and keep the same content. The structure survives the translation. The word order does not.

How many lines should follow the formula

Not all of them. A CV in which every line carries a percentage reads like a sales document, and it crowds out the duty lines that tell the reader what the job was. In Switzerland those lines also have to agree with the reference that arrives with them. For the two or three most recent positions, a handful of formula lines each is plenty. Older positions can stay as short duty lines.

Then tailor where it counts. The Z of each line is the natural place for the advert's own words, the system, standard or process it names. Adjusting a CV for each job only works if what changes is the vocabulary the advert uses. Reordering the same generic lines changes nothing a reader notices.

The CV check on SwissJobs.app scores a CV against one specific advert and against Swiss conventions such as the permit line and language levels. It is one way to see whether both the top block and the lines match the job you are sending them to.