Swiss job market report September 2026

Work mode

Of adverts that state a work mode, 91.5% are for on-site work. This is significantly higher than the 7.8% for hybrid and 0.7% for remote work. For job seekers, this means that most opportunities will require a physical presence in the workplace. Hybrid and remote work opportunities are less common, but still available in smaller numbers.

Employment type and workload

Of adverts that state an employment type, 85.7% are for full-time positions. Part-time positions make up 5.8% and apprenticeships 4.2%. This indicates that full-time work is the most common type of employment available. Job seekers looking for part-time work or apprenticeships may have fewer options. Of adverts that state a workload, 46.2% are for 80–100% workload, 26% for 100% workload, 24.1% for 50–80% workload, and 3.7% for under 50% workload. This shows that most job opportunities are for full-time or near-full-time workloads.

Seniority

Of adverts that state a seniority, 34.3% are for senior roles. Lead/head roles make up 32.2%, apprentice/intern 26.6%, and junior 6.9%. This suggests that there are more experienced and management roles available than junior or apprentice/intern positions. Job seekers with more experience or looking for management roles may have more opportunities available to them.

Languages

Of adverts, 60.7% are in German, 23.3% in English, 13.5% in French, and 2.5% in Italian. This reflects the linguistic diversity of Switzerland. Of adverts that require German, 53.9% do not require any proficiency, 29% require professional proficiency, and 15.3% require conversational proficiency. For French, 86.3% do not require any proficiency, and for English, 71.7% do not require any proficiency. This indicates that while many adverts are in German, a significant number are in English, and proficiency requirements vary widely.

Fields

The top field is management & consulting, with 28.2% of adverts. Engineering & technical follows with 20.7%, and health & care with 10.1%. Retail, administration & office, and sales & customer service each make up around 6%. IT & software and finance & insurance each make up around 5%. This shows a wide range of opportunities across various fields, with management & consulting being the most common.

Cantons

The canton with the most adverts is Zurich, with 29.1%. Bern follows with 14.1%, and Geneva with 8.8%. Vaud, Basel-Stadt, and Lucerne each have around 7% or less. This indicates that the majority of job opportunities are concentrated in a few cantons, with Zurich having the most. Job seekers may find more opportunities in these cantons, but there are still opportunities available in other cantons as well.

Languages: what is required, and at what level

German is the most required language but not a majority requirement: 45.9% of adverts name it. Where it is named, the bar is high. 65.8% of those adverts want German at professional or native level, 33.6% accept conversational level, 0.6% basic knowledge. For English the bar is clearer still: 79% of adverts requiring English want it at professional level. French sits at 77.8%.

Swiss adverts almost never state a level as a CEFR grade. The wording is «sehr gute Deutschkenntnisse», «verhandlungssicher», «fluent», «courant». A B2 or C1 rarely appears in the advert text. Putting a CEFR grade on your CV therefore translates something the employer did not phrase that way, and that translation is what saves the reader from guessing.

The combinations tell more than the single figures. 27.8% of adverts require German only, 10.2% English only, 15% both. 21.2% require two or more languages, 3.7% three or more. Languages other than the four national ones and English appear in 1%, mostly Spanish or Dutch.

The language an advert is written in is not the language it requires

59.4% of adverts are written in German, 22.8% in English, 12.7% in French, 2.4% in Italian. German-language adverts require German in 65.1% of cases, 42.7% at professional level, and English on top in 17.9%. A third name no language at all; there German is silently assumed, because the advert itself is written in it.

English-language adverts are the case that matters if you are arriving from abroad. 65.1% require English explicitly, 32% name no language, and 20.5% require German anyway, 15.5% of them at professional level. An advert in English does not mean German is irrelevant: for one in five it is a written condition. English-language adverts also require two languages more often (25%) than German-language ones (19.6%).

French-language adverts require French in 63%, English in 18.6% and German in 16.4%; 26.7% name two or more languages. Italian-language adverts are the exception in the row: half name no language at all, 36.1% name Italian.

Regions: German-speaking Switzerland, Romandie, Ticino

Of adverts with an identifiable canton, 74.9% are in German-speaking Switzerland, 22.9% in Romandie (Geneva, Vaud, Fribourg, Neuchâtel, Valais, Jura) and 2.3% in Ticino. In German-speaking Switzerland 55.5% of adverts require German, 37.3% at professional level, 29.1% English and 6.2% French. 21.4% of adverts there are written in English.

In Romandie French is required in 44%, English in 34.6%, German in 15.3%, of which 9.1% at professional level. A third of Romandie adverts are written in English and just over half in French. Someone relocating to Geneva or Lausanne meets a market where English is required more often than German and where a quarter of adverts want two languages.

In Ticino 48.6% of adverts require Italian, 25.5% English, 13.3% German. The base is small, so read it without decimals: roughly half Italian, a quarter English. For 27.2% of all adverts no canton could be determined; those are missing from the regional figures.

Fields: where two languages are the rule

The language requirement depends more on the field than on the region. In sales and customer service 47.5% of adverts require two or more languages, 56% English and 49.2% German at professional level; only 21.4% name no language. In finance and insurance 32.9% want two languages and 44.9% English. In management and consulting the figures are 26.3% and 35.3%.

The opposite end is health and care, and retail. In care 40.7% of adverts name no language, 2.5% require English and 5.3% two languages; where a language is stated it is German at professional level (29.9%). In retail 42.2% require German at professional level and 2.5% two languages. In both fields the local language is the only condition, and it is meant without exception.

IT and software has the lowest German share: 19.8% require professional German, 48.2% English, and 48.5% of its adverts are written in English. Engineering sits in between at 25.4% professional German and 30.4% English. Hybrid and remote adverts require English in 47.5% of cases against 26% for on-site roles, and 39.2% of them are written in English.

Workload: what the title states, and what the «full-time» label hides

80.2% of adverts state an employment type, and of those 91.6% say full-time. The picture changes once you read the titles. 23.4% of titles carry a workload, and of those 74.6% allow less than 100%: 46.7% give a range of 80 to 100%, 24.2% a range between 50 and 80%, 3.7% a workload under 50%. Only 25.4% of titles with a workload demand exactly 100%. 63.4% of those titles state a range rather than one number, which is a Swiss convention that a British or American reader will not have seen before.

Care is the field that advertises workload most openly: 55.6% of its titles carry one, 90.5% of those allow less than 100% and 55.4% allow 80% or less. Administration and office follows with 39% of titles carrying a workload, 74.8% of them below 100%. In engineering 16% of titles carry a workload and only 7% of those allow 80% or less; in management it is 14.8%, in IT 13.4%.

For applicants this means an advert categorised as full-time that carries «80–100%» in its title is a part-time offer. The title is the more reliable source than the category.

What else the title gives away: seniority and gender marker

Only 16.1% of titles carry a seniority word. Senior titles and leadership titles (Leiter, Head, Chef, Lead) each make up about 7%, junior titles 1.3%. The rest say nothing about the expected experience, and the requirement then sits in the text as «several years of experience» or a number of years. Searching for «junior» alone returns a tiny subset of what is actually open to people starting out.

32.4% of all titles carry a gender marker such as (m/w/d) or (h/f). In German-language adverts it is 43.3%, in French 28.9%, in English 11.9%, in Italian 6.2%. The marker means the role is open to men, women and non-binary applicants; it says nothing about the job. A further 29.1% of German titles use a paired form such as Fachfrau/-mann or Berater*in. 11.6% of titles name a place.

Who advertises, and how old the adverts are

The ten largest advertisers place 22.1% of all adverts. The largest single one is Rocken at 11.1%, a staffing firm that advertises on behalf of client companies; Coop follows at 3.9%. Roughly one advert in seven carries the name of a staffing or recruitment firm rather than the employer, measured against a list of names and therefore an approximation. For applicants: in a meaningful share of adverts the employer is not the sender.

The median advert is 28 days old. 31.6% of adverts are younger than two weeks, 30.2% older than two months. An advert open for more than sixty days is not a rarity but almost a third of the market.

Method

The data are the adverts active in the SwissJobs.app index on 30 September 2026, excluding apprenticeships, internships, trainee and working-student roles and adverts with a clearly foreign workplace. Language requirements were read from each advert's full text at collection and sorted into four levels; workload, seniority and gender marker come from the title; canton from the stated location; field from the title. Shares refer to all adverts of the group in question unless «of those» is stated. No counts are published. Change against the previous month follows from the next edition.