Class of 2026

The first job in IT is changing, and we think a beginner in Switzerland still has a good hand. The firms furthest ahead with AI now hire for judgement, autonomy and a clever use of AI tools, and a beginner can bring all three. Their teams are smaller and sit closer to the customer. Switzerland has ETH, EPFL and the frontier firms in Zurich.

It is harder than it was. The usual first job, the one where a beginner learned by doing the small things, is going away, and around Lake Geneva a firm can also hire an experienced engineer from across the border. But we think the work is changing more than it is shrinking.

The small jobs went first

"Small programming tasks, testing, documentation, data preparation." In October, Computerworld listed these as the tasks juniors used to learn the trade on. AI already does them, the article says.

The federal graduate survey came out in August. A year after their bachelor's, 6.4% of IT and technology graduates from the universities of applied sciences had no job. In the survey before it was 3.0%. More than 85% of those who had trouble finding work gave missing work experience as the reason. Job ads called entry-level often ask for two to three years of it (swissinfo noticed).

Two economists at KOF (ETH Zurich) found that since autumn 2022 unemployment rose faster in the jobs most exposed to AI, "especially for younger workers" among software developers. They still call it "no conclusive proof". We think it is the economy and AI together.

The AI specialists from ETH and EPFL are the exception. Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, OpenAI and Anthropic all have offices in Zurich and recruit them directly. "I see a large part of the graduates of the ETH AI Center move to the big tech groups," its head Andreas Krause told the NZZ (Netzwoche relayed it). The top of the class of 2026 is in demand. The general IT graduate has the hard time.

Harder around the lake

In June, ICT unemployment in the Lake Geneva region was 6.54%, against 3.91% in the Zurich region. In the canton of Geneva the number of ICT specialists looking for work more than doubled in three years.

We think the border explains a good part of it. Geneva employs 116,213 cross-border workers, which is 28% of all those in Switzerland. A firm here that wants an engineer with five years of experience can find one in France. So a beginner in Geneva competes with experienced people from a much larger pool. (We found no count for IT alone.)

Six people where there were forty

Swami Sivasubramanian runs agentic AI at AWS. In June he told GeekWire that projects which once needed 30 to 40 people are now done by teams of six to eight.

Anthropic published its own staff figures in October. Since early 2025 the share of juniors in its technical departments went from 21% to 14%. Its people, it writes, are "a thin layer atop a growing contingent of AI agents". (It sells the agents, so at least it is honest about it.)

Its chief executive, Dario Amodei, said as much at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. "I can see it within Anthropic, where I can look forward to a time where on the more junior end and on the more intermediate end we actually need less and not more people" (Unite.AI reported it).

Six experienced people and their agents have few small jobs left to hand to a beginner, and training one takes time from those six. SignalFire, a venture firm that tracks tech hiring, wrote in June that "junior engineers can slow a team down because the operational bottleneck has moved from writing code to reviewing it".

Anthropic's hiring managers now pay more attention to autonomy and judgement and less to narrow expertise. The clearest change is whether a candidate has "demonstrated creative use of AI tools".

The engineer who sits with the customer

AWS is putting 1 billion dollars into a unit of forward deployed engineers. AWS calls each small team a pod. It has five or six people, who sit with one customer at a time. Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same (CNBC has the list).

A forward deployed engineer, or FDE, is "a software engineer who works inside a customer's team to make a product work on that customer's real problems". The definition comes from FDE Club, the Swiss community for these engineers (and one of our ecosystem partners). Next to the engineer there is often a deployment strategist, the adviser who deals with the customer. A model can already do a lot of the work, but getting it to run inside a bank or a hospital still takes people on site.

Part of this is consulting with a new badge, and Gartner already has a word for it, "FDE-washing". But SignalFire has the share of these engineers up 30% since ChatGPT came out.

Few of these jobs are for beginners. Of 1,000 postings Bloomberry went through, 12% of those that state an experience level are open to someone with less than two years.

What comes next

Nobody expects IT jobs in Switzerland to disappear. About 266,000 people work in ICT occupations, and two-thirds of them are outside the tech industry, at banks, insurers, pharma companies and public offices that keep digitising.

The official forecast still says the country will be short of 54,400 ICT specialists by 2033. Its authors write that the effect of AI "cannot yet be estimated", so they left it out. In their slower scenario the gap is 24,200. We think that one is closer.

The growth is in a narrow place. HSLU counted about 5,000 job ads for AI roles in a year, a third more than the year before, while ads for general IT fell. Only 5% of them were for juniors (swissinfo has the summary).

Our read is that IT jobs in Switzerland will not fall much by 2030, and will grow far more slowly than in the last fifteen years, when they grew by two-thirds. The work shifts to experienced people in AI, in data and inside customer teams, and away from beginners and general profiles. If firms keep hiring so few beginners, the shortage of 2033 will be of people with seven or eight years of experience.

The people a beginner needs to learn from are already in the country, and more keep coming. Experienced people from abroad want to work here, and IMD ranked Switzerland first in the world for talent in 2025, as in the years before. A Swiss company that takes on beginners now, and lets them work next to those people, will have its experienced engineers in 2033.