What you didn’t know about foreign workers in Switzerland

Foreigners make up nearly a third of the Swiss workforce. Keystone / Salvatore Di Nolfi

The proportion of foreigners in the Swiss workforce is steadily increasing. But what roles do various nationalities tend to perform in the labour market and who are snatching the best jobs?

SWI has trawled through the numbers, courtesy of the Federal Statistical Office, to present five facts about foreign workers in Switzerland that you might not have previously known.

Workforce becoming more foreign

At the turn off the Millennium, foreign nationals occupied 23.6% of jobs in Switzerland. In 2002, Switzerland granted enhanced access to European Union workers by adopting the ‘Free Movement of Persons’ principle, which reduced restrictions on people from the EU coming to live in Switzerland.

Since then, the proportion of foreign employees in the Swiss workforce has steadily increased, now reaching 1.774 million people (of all nationalities) – which represented around a third of the total workforce at the end of 2022.

Gainful employment

Foreign workers from European Union states tend to have the highest rates of employment in Switzerland.

At the other end of the scale, people with Russian, Eritrean or Turkish passports have the lowest participation in the labour market.

Executive positions

A greater proportion of Americans, Brits and Greeks working in Switzerland occupy management roles than Swiss nationals.

Of course, in absolute numbers, there are far more Swiss citizens living in Switzerland than any other nationality. United States citizens, for example, make up just 0.2% of the 8.7 million population.

But when it comes to hiring foreign talent for executive roles, companies in Switzerland lean most heavily on certain nationalities.

Correlation to education

Executive positions and jobs in highly skilled vocations are generally awarded to people with university or college degrees.

Workers from the United States and Russia are the most likely to have completed tertiary education (92.5% and 87.8% respectively), followed by those from Britain (80.4%), the Netherlands (76.3% %) and Greece (72.7%).

This explains why so many of these passport holders are employed as scientists, technicians, financiers and the like (US 88.6%, Britain 83.6%, the Netherlands 80.8% and Russia 76.7%.

By comparison, only 48.2% of Swiss nationals hold a tertiary education qualification and 56% go on to take highly skilled jobs. Switzerland has one of the world’s strongest vocational apprenticeship systems, which for many school leavers is a more attractive proposition than attending university.

On the other side of the coin, people from other countries without tertiary qualifications tend to be employed in unskilled positions.

Less than 10% of workers from Sri Lanka and Eritrea have completed tertiary education and are therefore more likely to hold unskilled jobs (Sri Lankans 47.5%, Eritreans 37.5%).

Women dominate part-time work

Just as with Swiss nationals, women from other countries are more likely to work part-time than men. This gender difference in part-time work can be more pronounced with foreigners working in Switzerland.

There is again a correlation between lower educational qualifications and part-time work.