I have been given notice in Switzerland — how do I use the first 30 days?

Days 1 to 3: read what the letter actually starts

The letter usually names one date, and that date is rarely the important one. What governs first is the notice period. The Code of Obligations provides one month in the first year of service, two months from the second up to and including the ninth year, and three months thereafter, in each case to the end of a month. Those periods may be varied by written agreement, a standard employment contract or a collective agreement; they may be cut below one month only by a collective agreement and only for the first year of service. So the first thing to open is not your CV but your contract and any GAV (Gesamtarbeitsvertrag, the Swiss collective labour agreement) that covers your sector.

The second thing is almost never claimed. The same law says the employer must grant the usual free hours and days and, once notice has been given, the time necessary to look for another job — with the interests of both sides taken fairly into account. This is not a right to take afternoons off as you please; it is time for interviews, assessments and calls that happen during office hours. Raise it in week one and you are negotiating calmly. Raise it in week four and you are negotiating under pressure.

The third is an inventory. What is still outstanding at the end: holiday balance, overtime, a flexitime saldo, a share of the 13th month's salary, expenses, equipment. All of it is settled in the final payslip, and the final payslip is drafted in HR faster than anyone's memory of a verbal promise. Whatever was agreed belongs in an email this week.

Week 1: signing on — and why the order matters

The Unemployment Insurance Act asks two things of you, and both start before your last working day. First, you must register in person for placement as early as possible, and at the latest on the first day for which you claim unemployment benefit. Second, you must do everything that can reasonably be expected of you to avoid or shorten unemployment — in particular look for work, if necessary outside your previous occupation, and you must be able to prove those efforts. The second obligation runs from the day you learn of the termination, not from the day you register.

The registration itself is set out in the ordinance: it is done personally, either through the access platform for electronic services or by appearing at the competent office, which is the one for your place of residence. You give your AHV number, and the date of your registration is confirmed to you in writing. That confirmation is not paperwork — it is the record of when the clock started for you.

Here is the sequencing that trips people up, and it matters more if you are new to Switzerland. The arbeit.swiss portal and its e-services — the benefit application, the insured person's details, the proof of personal job-search efforts, document upload, job alerts — are, in the portal's own words, available exclusively to individuals already signed on as jobseekers with a regional employment centre. Registering for the portal needs an AGOV login, which is free at agov.admin.ch, plus your AHV number and an eight-digit Personennummer assigned by your RAV, found at the top of the letters from your unemployment fund. You cannot register for the portal first, because you do not have that number yet. Sign on, then register.

One more thing that is specific to reading the English pages: the federal portal's English version leaves the form names in German — 'Antrag auf Arbeitslosenentschädigung', 'Nachweis der persönlichen Arbeitsbemühungen' — and even 'Personennummer' untranslated. That is worth knowing before you go looking for an English-titled form that does not exist.

In parallel you choose your unemployment fund (Arbeitslosenkasse). It is a separate decision with its own criteria and its own page, and it belongs inside these 30 days, because the fund is what calculates and pays.

By day 30: the accident cover that lapses quietly

This is the deadline that appears in no termination letter and expires inside the first 30 days. The Accident Insurance Act states that the insurance ends at the end of the 31st day after the day on which entitlement to at least half of the salary ceases. While salary is still being paid you are covered; then one month runs, and your former employer's non-occupational accident cover is gone.

There is an instrument against this, and the law explicitly obliges the insurer to offer it: the insurer must give the insured person the possibility of extending the insurance by special agreement for up to six months. In German this is the Abredeversicherung; in French, the prolongation par convention. The decisive sentence, though, sits in the ordinance: agreements on extending non-occupational accident insurance, individual or collective, must be concluded before the end of that insurance. Before means before — not on day 32, after something has happened.

So the arithmetic is simple and uncomfortable: you have about a month to make a decision nobody asks you for and nobody reminds you about. Once you are signed on with the RAV and meeting the conditions for benefit, accident cover runs through the unemployment insurance; the gap is mainly the period in between, and any situation where no benefit entitlement arises. Ask your former employer's accident insurer about the agreement and its price before the month is out — the enquiry is free.

The same weeks are the moment to look at occupational pension. Leaving employment ends your membership of the employer's pension fund and turns the accumulated capital into vested benefits. That is another decision with a form and a deadline, and it also falls inside these four weeks.

While the people are still there: the Arbeitszeugnis

The Code of Obligations is short about it: the employee may at any time ask the employer for a reference covering the nature and duration of the employment relationship and commenting on performance and conduct. At the employee's express request, the reference is limited to nature and duration. 'At any time' includes during the notice period — it does not have to wait for the last day.

The reason to ask inside the first 30 days is organisational rather than legal. A reference is written by the person who knows your work. Terminations often come with a reorganisation, and in three months that person may have gone. Then HR writes one from the job description and the objectives, and it reads exactly like that.

The Arbeitszeugnis is also the document with no equivalent in most countries people arrive from. It is not a US-style reference letter you can ask a friendly manager to write, and it is not a line on a CV: it is a formal document, expected in a Swiss application dossier alongside the CV, written in a conventionalised language whose phrases carry grading. Ask for the final reference in writing, name a realistic date, and offer a list of your tasks and projects — that is not self-promotion, it is help for whoever has to write it, and it makes a complete description more likely. The linked pages cover how the wording is read and what to do when the result is wrong.

Weeks 2 to 4: what the market actually moves in 30 days

One figure here helps more than any advice. Of the adverts currently open on SwissJobs.app, 47 per cent were posted within the last 30 days; the median open advert is 31 days old, a quarter are younger than 15 days and a quarter older than 79. A month is therefore about half a turnover of what is visible. If week one feels empty, week five is a market that is half new.

That turnover is not the same speed everywhere, and this changes the strategy rather than the effort. In retail, around 63 per cent of open adverts are under 30 days old; hospitality 57, office and administration 57, IT 55, care 50 — but construction and the trades only 39 per cent, where the median advert sits at 35 days. In a fast-turning field it is reasonable to search narrowly in the first weeks and let the search run. In a slow-turning one the same plan is a waiting strategy, and the radius — region, workload, adjacent roles — belongs on the table earlier.

Two more numbers from the same index set expectations. First, only around 9 per cent of open adverts are part-time or state a reduced Pensum (the Swiss workload percentage), and the spread is wide: 32 per cent in care, 2 per cent in IT. Looking for less than 100 per cent means looking in a much smaller market, and it is better to know that in week two. Second, about two thirds of adverts name at least one required language. The language an advert is written in is not the same as the language it requires: just under 42 per cent of adverts are in German, 21 per cent in English and 11 per cent in French. An English-language advert from Zurich often still expects German, and a German one from Biel sometimes expects French. If you are arriving from abroad, that gap between advert language and required language is the single most common mismatch.

For the weekly plan this means: these three weeks are where your search grid takes shape — field, region, workload, languages. Not as an intention, but as a concrete list of employers and channels you hold up against the result at the end of the month.

By the fifth of the following month: the proof that counts

The last deadline of the first 30 days falls in the next month. The ordinance is precise: the insured person must submit proof of job-search efforts for each control period at the latest on the fifth day of the following month, or the first working day after it. Let the deadline pass without an excusable reason and the efforts are no longer taken into account. The competent office reviews the efforts every month.

'No longer taken into account' means the applications were written and they do not count. The act treats insufficient personal effort to find suitable work as a ground for suspension, and the ordinance puts a number on it: suspension lasts 1 to 15 days for slight fault, 16 to 30 days for medium fault and 31 to 60 days for serious fault. Those are days without benefit, in the month when the salary has already stopped.

Efforts made during the notice period belong in the same proof. Anyone who starts applying only after the last working day has little to show for the first control periods, even though they were busy in hindsight — the effort simply happened before their own sense of being 'unemployed'.

In practice this rarely fails on willingness and almost always on recording. An effort not written down the same day is either painfully reconstructed at month's end or lost: the advert is offline, the contact name is gone, the date is a guess. So week one contains one decision that costs nothing — where you record. A sheet, a spreadsheet, or a tool that logs applications as you make them and fills the official SECO form, 'Nachweis der persönlichen Arbeitsbemühungen', from them. What matters is that you make the choice on day three, not on the fourth of the following month.