Job Index Q1 2025
Slight recovery in the job market: number of vacancies up 2% with the proportion of job offers for young professionals on the rise.
Zurich, 24 April 2025 – After a low at the end of 2024, the Swiss job market showed the first signs of slight recovery in the first quarter of 2025, despite ongoing economic uncertainty. In addition, young professionals have better opportunities than at any point since the coronavirus pandemic – the proportion of job vacancies aimed at them has significantly risen and now reached a record level.
This is shown by the Adecco Group Swiss Job Market Index, a scientifically substantiated study conducted by the Adecco Group Switzerland and the University of Zurich’s Swiss job market monitor.
Sources: KOF Swiss Economic Institute (KOF Employment Indicator), State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO; real GDP), Swiss Job Market Monitor (SMM; Adecco Group Swiss Job Market Index).
NB: An Adecco Group Swiss Job Market Index or GDP value over 100 indicates an increase and a value under 100 indicates a decrease compared with the base quarter of Q1 2008. A KOF Employment Indicator value over 100 means that more companies are planning to create rather than cut jobs. If the value is under 100, more job cuts are planned.
Overview of key findings
- After the low at the end of 2024, the job market has recovered slightly – rising 2% in the first quarter of 2025 compared with the previous quarter.
- However, the situation on the labour market remains strained due to the global economic and security climate
- Special focus on young professionals: :
- Job opportunities for young professionals have increased significantly since 2014 and especially since 2020
- Skills shortages due to the coronavirus pandemic and demographic change have prompted increasing demand for young professionals
Following its early low last quarter (Q4 2024), the Adecco Group Swiss Job Market Index noted a slight recovery in the job market in the first quarter of 2025, with an increase of 2%. However, it is still down 9% on the first quarter of 2024. This slight recovery in the job market is also supported by the KOF Employment Indicator, which suggests that more companies are currently planning to create jobs than to cut them.
Marcel Keller, Country President Adecco Switzerland
Special focus: jobs for young professionals
The coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 triggered an economic downturn in Switzerland. As many studies have shown, young professionals are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of economic crises. Unlike earlier recessions, the labour market for young professionals recovered astonishingly quickly from the negative impact of the pandemic. These individuals particularly benefited from the historic rise in job vacancies from 2020 onwards – the number of jobs for young professionals increased at an above-average rate (see diagram 2). The proportion of all job advertisements aimed at young professionals grew from 21% in 2019 to 28.8% in the first quarter of 2025. It is notable that this proportion has continued to grow, despite the total number of job vacancies declining from mid-2023 onwards.
Given this, the question arises as to which specific job advertisement characteristics could have influenced this above-average increase in young professional jobs. To determine this, an analysis was conducted on how the proportion of young professional jobs – differentiated by various job advertisement characteristics – has changed over time, and where it currently stands. In order to compare similar periods, the average from the second quarter of 2015 to the first quarter of 2016 was compared with that for the second quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2025. During this period, the proportion of young professional jobs rose by a total of 6.3 percentage points to 27.7% in 2024/25.
Differentiation by occupational group highlights clear differences
The largest increase in young professional jobs between 2015/16 and 2024/25 was in academic STEM and health professions with +7.9 percentage points (pp). Healthcare graduate professions (such as doctors and qualified nursing staff) played a particular role in this increase, and currently have the largest shortage in the Adecco Skills Shortage Index (first place). Academic science professions (such as engineers and bioscientists) also contributed to the rise in young professional jobs, as these are occupational groups with a similar skills shortage (fourth place).
The second-highest increase in young professional jobs was seen among the skilled office and administrative personnel (+3.9 pp). Skilled office personnel played a particular role in this, especially in 2020/21. However, the proportion of these has declined somewhat since 2022, as has the number of job vacancies for this occupational group, most likely due to technological change. The third-highest growth was recorded by skilled service and sales personnel (+3.6 pp), especially in the period from 2020 onwards. This was, in fact, the occupational group with the highest proportion of young professional jobs in 2024/25, at 40.9%, and has been a key driver of job growth across Switzerland since 2021.
Skilled trade and support personnel, on the other hand, only saw a small increase (+0.5 pp) during the period 2015/16-2024/25. After a decline up until 2020, this proportion increased again to 37.6% – a high overall value . In addition, this occupational group has played a major role in overall job growth in recent years. Skilled technology personnel even saw a decline in the proportion of young professional jobs in the period 2015/16-2024/25 (-2.9 pp), which was most likely due to the subgroup of information and communications technicians, where the total number of job vacancies has been declining since 2021.
Major regions: regional structure is a crucial factor in young professional job trends
Separating the proportion of young professional jobs by region shows clear differences between Switzerland’s major regions. At the top of the pile is the Espace Mittelland region, with an 11.3 percentage-point increase in young professional jobs between 2015/16 and 2024/25 and a proportion of 33.2% in 2024/25. The significant rise in the Adecco Skills Shortage Index in this region from 2021 to 2023 indicates that the increase in young professional jobs is at least in part due to a skills shortage, as in such times companies are increasingly forced to make use of young professionals (demographic change). Similarly high rises can be observed in central Switzerland (+6.1 pp), southwestern Switzerland (+5.8 pp), and Zurich (+5.0 pp).
Northwestern Switzerland, on the other hand, saw a moderate rise of 1.8 percentage points, with eastern Switzerland recording minimal growth of 0.8 percentage points – although the latter currently has an above-average proportion of young professional jobs, at 30.5% in 2024/25. The number of young professional jobs in this region began rising in 2022, it also recorded the highest Adecco Skills Shortage Index values anywhere in Switzerland, potentially indicating a connection between the shortages and young professional jobs.
Level of education: education requirements for young professionals are increasingly changing
A look at the educational requirements of young professional jobs shows some interesting differences. The majority of the jobs that require no non-compulsory education are young professional jobs (51.1%). However, the proportion of these young professional jobs has fallen slightly since 2015/16 (-2.6 pp), due to increasing demand for more highly qualified young professionals. At the same time, the number of young professional jobs requiring completion of secondary level II (e.g. apprenticeship or secondary school) has risen by 6.4 percentage points – to a total of 27.6% in 2024/25. The same applies for jobs requiring tertiary education (e.g. university or vocational college degree), where the proportion of young professional jobs is up 5.8 percentage points to 18.2%.
It is clear from these results that the requirements for young professionals are increasingly changing: individuals with few qualifications will still find entry-level opportunities, but there is a trend towards higher educational requirements. Needless to say, this trend applies to the entire labour market and not just young professionals.
Company size: strong growth for medium and large companies
In 2024/25, small companies had the highest proportion of young professional jobs (32.5%), but this is in fact down slightly on 2015/16 (-0.1 pp). Medium and large companies, on the other hand, saw a significant increase in young professional jobs (+7.6 and +7.5 pp), even though their proportion for 2024/25 is slightly lower overall (28.3% and 24.7%). This means that they are increasingly recruiting young professionals. For medium companies in particular, this could increasingly be related to the skills shortage.
Conclusion
The proportion of job vacancies for young professionals rose significantly in many areas between 2015/16 and 2024/25 – particularly for STEM and health professions and in certain major regions such as Espace Mittelland. Professions with greater educational requirements, such as secondary II or tertiary levels, have also seen a marked rise. At the same time, medium and large companies in particular are increasingly recruiting young professionals.
‘The striking, disproportionate increase in job vacancies for young professionals during the period after the coronavirus pandemic could be a marker of a skills shortage, as companies are more prepared to accept lower initial levels of productivity in order to ensure that their vacancies are filled. Having said that, other results show that a number of occupational groups with particularly high increases in young professional jobs between 2015/16 and 2024/25 did not see an increased skills shortage during this period and are also not occupational groups that currently have a particularly high shortage of skilled workers. This indicates that, alongside the skills shortage, there could be other reasons for the sudden increase in young professional jobs after 2020 and the current rise, such as an unusually good labour market situation for young professionals immediately after the coronavirus pandemic.’
Johanna Bolli-Kemper, Swiss Job Market Monitor
To conclude, the significant increase in young professional jobs after the pandemic could indicate an unusually quick recovery in the labour market for young people in Switzerland. As shown by studies conducted in the USA and the Netherlands, many experienced workers temporarily withdrew from the labour market during the pandemic and were not actively seeking jobs. This meant that despite high levels of unemployment, competition for job vacancies was relatively low – which was particularly beneficial to young professionals. Their employment situation improved more quickly than that of the older working population, indicating milder long-term consequences for young professionals than in previous crises. Switzerland also displayed a similar pattern: between 2020 and 2022, unemployment in the 15-24 age group fell significantly more quickly than in the 25-64 age group.
Given this, two factors could have played a particular role in the marked increase in young professional jobs, especially after 2020. Firstly, in the years after 2020, this was primarily the relatively quick recovery in the young professional job market following the coronavirus pandemic. And secondly, in the last two years, there has been a skills shortage as a result of demographic change, which could explain the rise in the proportion of young professional jobs despite a drop in job vacancies overall.