Which keywords is my CV missing?

Updated: 23 August 2026

In short

There is no general list, and we can show why. We compared every pair of adverts within the same occupation and counted how much specialist vocabulary they share. Two adverts for the same software role have about six percent of their content words in common; two project-management adverts about ten; two care adverts in German under four. A single advert names roughly twenty specialist words in total. The keywords you are missing sit in the one advert you are answering, not in any list.

The keyword problem that actually costs people interviews in Switzerland is not a missing tool name. It is language. Across the adverts where we can identify the language, roughly fifty-seven percent are written in German, twenty-eight in English, thirteen in French and two in Italian — and the split moves enormously by region. Around Zürich, four in ten adverts are in English. Around Bern, fewer than one in ten. The same job needs different words depending on which side of the country it sits.

The second reliable gap is your qualification. Swiss adverts talk in abbreviations — EFZ, HF, FH, CFC — far more often than in degrees. If your CV translates a Swiss apprenticeship into a vague English phrase, or leaves a foreign degree without a Swiss reference point, you have removed the one word that is unambiguous.

Share of adverts written in English, by region

Share of the adverts in each region whose text is in English, out of the adverts where the language could be identified — around three quarters of the index. Ongoing analysis of the Swiss adverts we hold, August 2026.

Two adverts for the same occupation share between three and eleven percent of their specialist vocabulary. The highest figures come from occupations dominated by a few large employers, not from occupations with clearer requirements.
Between half and two thirds of an occupation's entire vocabulary appears in exactly one advert. Any tool reporting dozens of missing keywords is mostly reporting that tail.
Across advert titles, 'engineer' dominates the technical roles — more than ten times as common as either 'developer' or the German 'Entwickler', which are about equally rare. Three words for one job, split across two languages.
In German-language adverts, 'EFZ' appears in over ten percent, while 'Bachelor' and 'Master' together appear in under one and a half percent. Swiss vocational abbreviations outrank academic titles in this market.
Soft words beat tool names by an order of magnitude: a quarter of German adverts ask for flexibility or resilience, while SAP appears in two percent and Excel in under half a percent.

Why the list you are looking for does not exist

The question assumes each occupation has a stable vocabulary you can copy once and be done with. We were able to test that. For each occupation we took every advert we hold, stripped out ordinary connective words, kept everything that looked like a specialist term, and then compared every possible pair of adverts: how many of those words do two adverts for the same job actually have in common?

For English-language software roles, the answer is about six percent — roughly two shared words per pair, out of the twenty or so each advert names. English-language project-management adverts reach about ten percent. In German, care adverts share under four percent, administrative adverts a little over three, logistics under three. Retail and kitchen roles score highest, at nine to eleven percent, and that is not because the work is better defined; it is because a small number of large employers write a large share of the adverts in the same house style.

The second measurement is blunter still. Pool every word used anywhere in an occupation, and between half and two thirds of them turn out to appear in exactly one advert. Logistics is the extreme at roughly two thirds. So each occupation has a very small hard core and a very long tail of one-off phrasing.

The practical consequence: a report listing forty missing keywords is mostly listing that tail. What is worth doing is comparing your CV against three to five real adverts you would genuinely apply to, and keeping only the words that show up in more than one of them. In our data that shortlist is usually a handful of terms — which is a relief, because a handful is something you can honestly account for in an interview.

In Switzerland, the first missing keyword is a language

Most keyword advice is written for a single-language market and quietly assumes the advert and your CV are in the same language. In Switzerland that assumption breaks. Of the adverts where we can identify the language, German accounts for roughly fifty-seven percent, English for twenty-eight, French for thirteen and Italian for two.

Those national figures hide the part that matters. In the Zürich area, around forty-two percent of adverts are written in English; in Basel around thirty-five; in French-speaking Switzerland around thirty-eight, against fifty-five in French. In the Bern area, English drops to under seven percent, with German at over eighty. In Ticino, roughly seven in ten adverts are in Italian and one in four in English.

So the honest answer to 'which keywords am I missing' often is: the German ones, or the French ones. An English-only CV competes for a genuinely large slice of the Zürich and Geneva markets and a very small slice of the Bern market. If you are targeting German-speaking Switzerland outside the big international employers, the single highest-value change is not adding a tool name — it is producing a German version of the same document.

There is a cheaper intermediate step that is worth taking regardless. Where a term has an established German or French form, put both in once: the job title, your qualification, and the names of any regulated processes you work with. You are not stuffing synonyms; you are stating the same fact in the two languages in which the market states it.

How to write a Swiss qualification in English — and a foreign one in Switzerland

Swiss adverts lean on abbreviations. In German-language adverts, 'EFZ' appears in more than one in ten; 'HF' in around three percent; 'FH' and 'EBA' in about one and a half each; 'Bachelor' and 'Master' together in under one and a half. In French-language adverts, 'CFC' appears in nearly one in five, against four and a half percent for bachelor or master degrees. These abbreviations are the most unambiguous words in the entire market, and they are the ones people most often paraphrase away.

If you hold a Swiss qualification and are writing in English, the official wording already exists and you do not have to invent it. The federal register of occupations lists every qualification of vocational and professional education under its protected title. And the Certificate Supplement and Diploma Supplement — issued in German, French, Italian and English, on the European Europass template — exist precisely so employers at home and abroad can read what a Swiss qualification means. Use the wording from your own supplement, keep the original abbreviation next to it, and you have covered both readers.

If your qualification is foreign, do the reverse: give the original title, the country, the duration and the field, and add the Swiss reference level only if you actually have a formal statement of it. The national qualifications framework places vocational and professional qualifications on eight levels, so a level is a real, checkable thing — which is exactly why you should not assign yourself one.

What you should not do is quietly upgrade. Rewriting a three-year apprenticeship as a 'Bachelor-equivalent' is the sort of keyword addition that survives the first screen and fails the reference check. The abbreviation you actually hold is the better keyword anyway, because it is the one the adverts use.

The words that recur are duller than you expect

Search the German-language adverts for individual terms rather than whole vocabularies and the hard core appears — and it is made of ordinary competence words, not software. Flexibility or resilience shows up in over a quarter. Further training in nearly a quarter. Customer contact, advice or service in around twelve percent. A word from the communication family in roughly twelve. Teamwork in over nine. Working independently in over eight.

The tools sit far below. Office in any spelling reaches about five percent, SAP a little over two, Excel under half a percent. That does not make Excel unimportant; it means it is assumed rather than stated. But it does mean that a CV crowded with tool names and silent on advising clients or working independently has filled the wrong gap.

The French-language adverts behave the same way with different words: training appears in over a third, a diploma in nearly eighteen percent, autonomy in twelve, communication in twelve, flexibility in eleven — while SAP sits below two percent and Excel below one. Italian-language adverts put experience first at nearly six in ten, then training at a fifth, teamwork and flexibility in the teens.

The useful test is therefore not 'do I list enough technologies'. It is: does my CV state, in a sentence about work I actually did, that I advised clients, worked independently, coped with changing demands, and kept training? If those claims only exist as a row of adjectives in a sidebar, they are not in the document in any way that counts.

The trap: the most distinctive words are often not skills

You can calculate, for any occupation, which words appear far more often there than in the market at large. That is exactly what a keyword tool does, and the output is revealing — and substantially unusable.

Among German-language electrical-installation adverts, roughly a third contain a single employer's marketing coinage about the future of energy. Among retail adverts, one large chain's own name appears in about a fifth. Among French-language care adverts, the abbreviation of a single institution appears in about a sixth. Statistically these are the standout terms. Practically they are worthless, and copying them into your CV reads exactly like what it is.

The same applies to the benefits employers advertise. In retail, words around staff discounts and perks are among the most frequent terms in the whole cohort — they describe what the employer gives, not what you can do. A keyword list that does not distinguish between requirements and inducements will hand you both.

The rule that survives contact with the data: only borrow a word that names a task, a tool, a qualification, a standard or a language. Brand names, culture language, benefit lists and coined slogans stay out, however frequent they are.

Ten minutes, done properly

Open three to five adverts you would really apply to. Mark every noun that names a task, a tool, a qualification, a standard or a language. Keep only those appearing in at least two of the adverts. Our overlap figures predict what you will find: a short list, often under ten words, and one of them will simply be the name of the occupation.

Then work through that short list in order. Which of these can you genuinely do, and is missing from your CV? That is the real gap, and it belongs inside the description of the job where you did it, not in a skills panel down the side. Which are present but under a different word? Adopt the advert's wording. Which can you not do? Leave them out — a keyword you cannot defend in conversation costs you more than the one you skipped.

Check the language question before any of this, because it outranks everything else. If you are applying in Bern, Lucerne or St Gallen, the odds are strongly that the advert, the screening and the interview will be in German, and an English CV is a bigger gap than any missing term. If you are applying in Zürich, Zug or Geneva to an international employer, English is genuinely competitive — but the German or French version still widens the field considerably.

Finally, read the finished document as though you had never seen the advert. Borrowed words announce themselves: the register shifts, the sentence stops sounding like you. A keyword that works disappears into your own sentence about your own work. One that does not sits next to it like a quotation.

All shares come from our ongoing analysis of the Swiss job adverts we hold, as of August 2026. Overlap figures are measured on our condensed requirement text for each advert rather than on the full original: what is compared is the vocabulary an advert foregrounds, not its literal wording. The comparison between occupations is therefore the robust part, not the absolute level. Individual term shares are measured within adverts of the stated language. Language shares are measured across the adverts whose language could be identified, around three quarters of those we hold. We publish shares, never absolute index sizes.

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Sources

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%