What Swiss employers value beyond qualifications
Are formal qualifications becoming less important in Switzerland?
Not exactly. But the way employers describe what they are looking for is changing.
A study published in April 2026 by Adecco Group Switzerland and the University of Zurich analysed more than one million Swiss job advertisements published between 2015 and 2026.
Its findings point to a gradual shift in the balance of requirements mentioned in job advertisements: transversal skills are gaining relative importance, while requirements related to formal knowledge and education are declining.
This does not mean that degrees are disappearing from recruitment. Nor does the study tell us who employers ultimately hire.
What it does show is that employers are increasingly describing successful candidates through a broader combination of qualifications, professional expertise and transferable skills.
A shift in employer expectations
To understand what is changing, it helps to look at how the requirements in those job ads were classified.
The study analysed more than one million advertisements published between 2015 and 2026 and grouped the skills and requirements they contained using ESCO — the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations framework.
The categories include transversal skills, knowledge, occupation-specific skills and language skills.
One point is essential when reading the results: the percentages do not represent the share of job advertisements asking for a particular skill or qualification. They represent the relative share of each category among all the requirements identified.
In other words, the study shows how the balance of what employers ask for is changing over time.
A growing focus on transversal skills
According to the Adecco Group Swiss Job Market Index Q1 2026, transversal skills already account for the largest share of requirements identified in Swiss job advertisements — and their weight is continuing to grow.
Since 2022, their share has risen from just under 60% to more than 63%. Over a longer period, knowledge requirements have moved slightly in the opposite direction, falling from around 25% in 2015 to below 23% in 2026, while occupation-specific skills have remained broadly stable.
The significance lies less in the size of these movements than in what is moving and what is not.
Employers do not appear to be replacing specialist expertise with generic “soft skills”. Occupation-specific requirements remain remarkably stable. Instead, the data point to a gradual rebalancing of the candidate profile: what a person knows and can technically do still matters, but employers are placing greater emphasis on how that expertise is applied; through initiative, collaboration, adaptability and problem-solving.
Adecco’s analysis also shows that this shift occurs within occupations, rather than simply reflecting growth in professions where transversal skills were already more common. This suggests a change in expectations inside jobs themselves.
The emerging picture is therefore more nuanced than “skills replacing degrees”. Qualifications and technical expertise remain important, but they increasingly sit alongside a broader set of capabilities that help employees navigate changing and more complex work environments.
The skills behind the shift
The shift towards transversal skills is not evenly distributed across every type of capability. Three areas emerge particularly clearly from the Swiss data and together they say something about the kind of employee organisations are increasingly looking for.
1. Self-management and autonomy
Self-management is one of the most prominent categories identified in the Adecco analysis.
Skills such as proactivity, initiative and independent working feature strongly, alongside willingness to learn and adaptability.
The common thread is autonomy. Employers are not only looking for people who can carry out defined tasks, but for employees who can take ownership, respond to change and keep learning as their role evolves.
2. Social and communication skills
A second cluster concerns the ability to work effectively with others.
Teamwork and networking are among the requirements that appear most frequently in the data.
This reflects a workplace in which expertise is rarely exercised in isolation. Employees increasingly need to collaborate across teams, functions and professional disciplines, as well as ensuring their own expertise is useful to others.
3. Thinking and problem-solving skills
The third area concerns how employees make sense of complexity.
Analytical thinking, critical thinking and the ability to structure information all feature in the Swiss findings.
These capabilities become especially valuable when work cannot be reduced to a fixed procedure: employees need to interpret situations, weigh options and decide how their knowledge should be applied.
The skills mix at a glance
| Skill category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Self-management | Initiative, independent working, willingness to learn, adaptability |
| Social and communication skills | Teamwork, networking, communication |
| Cognitive skills | Analytical thinking, critical thinking, problem-solving |
Taken together, the pattern reinforces the broader shift identified in the data. Employers are not simply asking what candidates know or what tasks they can perform. They are also placing greater emphasis on how people use their expertise: independently, collaboratively and in situations that require judgement.
AI is only part of the story
It would be easy to assume that the growing emphasis on transversal skills is largely a response to artificial intelligence.
The Swiss data suggest a more complex picture.
According to the Adecco analysis, job advertisements for occupations that are more exposed to AI tend to list more requirements overall : around 7.3% more skills and competences than less AI-exposed roles.
But those additional requirements are not disproportionately transversal.
In highly AI-exposed occupations, the share of transversal skills is actually 3.1 percentage points lower, while knowledge requirements account for 2.3 percentage points more. Both differences are statistically significant.
This makes AI an unlikely explanation for the broader rise in transversal skills. If anything, the most AI-exposed roles continue to place particularly strong demands on specialist knowledge alongside other capabilities.
The shift therefore appears to reflect something broader than automation alone: work is becoming more complex, roles are changing, and employees are increasingly expected to navigate uncertainty, collaborate across boundaries and adapt as their responsibilities evolve.
For HR and Learning & Development teams, this changes the question. It is not simply a matter of identifying the “human skills AI cannot replace”.
The more relevant challenge is how to build combinations of technical expertise, professional knowledge, cognitive skills and interpersonal capabilities that allow people to work effectively alongside new technologies.
The skills race is not either/or
The Swiss picture is part of a broader international pattern: technological skills are rising fast, but they are not pushing human capabilities aside.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies analytical thinking as the most important core skill among employers in 2025, cited by 69% of respondents.
Other leading capabilities include resilience, flexibility and agility, leadership and social influence, creative thinking, and motivation and self-awareness.
By 2030, the fastest-growing skills are expected to be technological, led by AI and big data, networks and cybersecurity, and technological literacy.
Yet the same report also expects several human-centred capabilities to become more important, including creative thinking, resilience and flexibility, curiosity and lifelong learning, leadership, and analytical thinking.
The implication is not that organisations must choose between technical and transversal skills.
They increasingly need people who can combine technological fluency with judgement, adaptability, creativity and the ability to work effectively with others.
From credentials to capability
The OECD Skills Outlook 2025 points in the same direction: as work changes, employers and labour markets need better ways to recognise what people can actually do.
The OECD places particular emphasis on lifelong learning and on capabilities such as literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem solving, which continue to develop throughout adulthood.
It also argues for a more skills-first approach to labour markets. One that makes competencies easier to identify, assess and recognise, regardless of where they were acquired.
That matters because skills do not come from a single source. They can be developed through formal education, vocational training, professional experience, continuing education and learning on the job.
The point is not to make qualifications obsolete. It is to avoid treating them as the only credible evidence of capability.
For employers, this means looking more closely at the full range of signals a candidate brings: what they have studied, what they have done, what they have learned and what they can demonstrate in practice.
What happens after the job ad
The shift visible in Swiss job advertisements is significant, but it should not be mistaken for proof that hiring practices have already changed to the same extent.
The Adecco study analyses what employers ask for in job ads. It does not track who is shortlisted, interviewed or ultimately hired.
That distinction matters. A stronger emphasis on initiative, teamwork, analytical thinking or adaptability does not automatically mean these capabilities are being assessed more systematically during recruitment.
Adecco itself remains cautious, presenting competency-based hiring as a possible explanation for the observed shift, rather than evidence of a completed transformation.
For HR teams, this is where the real question begins:
If employers say these skills matter, how are they actually measuring them?
A more skills-based recruitment process can include structured competency interviews, work samples, practical assessments, behavioural simulations and validated assessment tools. It can also give greater weight to evidence from professional experience and learning acquired outside traditional academic pathways.
The goal is not to remove qualifications from recruitment.
It is to ensure they are one source of evidence among several, rather than the sole proxy for a candidate’s ability to perform.
One trend, different realities
The growing emphasis on transversal skills is not uniform across the labour market.
According to Adecco’s occupational analysis, the strongest statistically significant increases are found in highly qualified social professions and in sales, administration and commercial roles.
Technical occupations also make a substantial contribution to the overall rise once the size and changing weight of different occupational groups are taken into account.
Craft and industrial occupations, by contrast, are the only broad group to show a statistically significant decline.
The pattern matters because it rules out a one-size-fits-all interpretation. The value placed on transversal skills depends heavily on the nature of the work itself.
Roles built around collaboration, judgement, client interaction or coordination may place growing emphasis on these capabilities, while other occupations continue to rely more heavily on technical or task-specific expertise.
For employers, the implication is clear: the relevant skills mix has to be defined role by role, not imported from a generic competency framework.
The next challenge for HR and L&D
The most useful conclusion is not that degrees matter less. It is that qualifications alone tell only part of the story.
A diploma can signal knowledge and learning. Professional experience shows how someone has operated in real work situations. Technical skills indicate whether they can perform role-specific tasks. Transversal skills add another layer: they show how effectively people can apply what they know when situations change.
These different signals are complementary.
For recruitment teams, the challenge is therefore to identify which capabilities genuinely matter for a role — and to assess them in ways that go beyond credentials alone.
For Learning & Development teams, the implication is equally important. Skills such as analytical thinking, communication, initiative and adaptability should not remain abstract items in a competency framework. They need to be developed through practice, feedback and situations that reflect the realities of work.
The broader question for organisations is becoming harder to avoid:
If skills matter alongside qualifications, how well are we identifying, developing and recognising them?
If this raises questions for your organisation, whether around recruitment, skills assessment or the development of transversal skills, our team would be happy to continue the conversation.
Get in touch with Swissnova to discuss your needs or find out more about our programmes.
