A new survey from the ManpowerGroup has found that 40 percent of companies in Switzerland are still offering new jobs. Despite renewed economic uncertainty worldwide, international companies remain on the Swiss market and are still struggling to find workers to fill highly skilled roles across a number of sectors.
According to the survey of 500 Swiss employers, around 40 percent are still looking to hire more people in the next year, a slight decline compared to the same survey in March 2023. Around 47 percent say they are happy with the number of staff at their firm, while just 13 percent see job losses on the horizon.
Speaking to Watson, the head of ManpowerGroup Switzerland, Jan Jacob, said that while the “demand for additional staff is decreasing”, the job market in the alpine nation is still on a high and is “very good” compared to neighbours Germany and France. “But you can see the first clouds in the economic sky, which makes companies more cautious", he added.
Interestingly, Jacob said that because of the ongoing war in Ukraine and other destabilising events abroad, the job market in Switzerland would usually begin to take a turn for the worst. "In the past, hiring freezes were imposed immediately in such situations, but this time it's different", he noted, explaining that “the shortage of skilled workers is so great that even an economic dip won't solve the problem."
ManpowerGroup found that workers are needed across industries, with the IT, technical, trade, healthcare, logistics and gastronomy sectors suffering from the most acute shortages. Even in industries like banking - where hundreds of Credit Suisse employees have recently lost their jobs after its merger with UBS - Jacob noted that “there is no sign of an oversupply of bankers."
Looking to the future, ManpowerGroup said that Switzerland’s main challenge will be coping with demographic changes as fewer people work and more people retire. Jacob added that while moves towards digitisation can “lead to increases in efficiency,” firms “cannot replace [the] critical thinking and creativity” found in human workers.
In terms of what people should specialise in, Jacob said that people should “learn an IT profession or a profession such as a baker or a plumber, and not one that is primarily about typing" - an allusion to Chat CPT and other artificial intelligence programmes. “Green jobs" relating to the energy transition and climate change are also set to be in high demand in the years to come.
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