Long portrayed as a generation at odds with the professional world, today’s young workforce in fact has a far less binary relationship with work than is often suggested. What is changing is less their priorities than the conditions under which they are willing to commit themselves, and figures from the Federal Statistical Office sketch out the contours of that shift.
For a long time, the young employee fit a familiar template: accept the constraints of an early career, prove oneself, progress step by step and, if possible, remain with the same company for several years. That picture now appears less relevant. Young workers are often described as more demanding, less attached to their employer, and more concerned with work-life balance. Yet Swiss labour market statistics help put this into perspective, as they do not point to a lack of interest in work, but rather to a redefinition of what engagement means: more mobile, more flexible in form, and more exposed to contractual precarity.
Three indicators from the Swiss labour market make it possible to quantify this shift. The first is professional mobility. According to the Federal Statistical Office, 14.7% of workers in Switzerland changed jobs between 2022 and 2023, a rate that climbs to 23.8% among 15–24-year-olds, well above the national average. This figure does not reflect aimless instability; it corresponds to the learning and trial-and-error phase typical of an early career, when changing employer remains the most direct way to advance in responsibility and pay. Moreover, according to another FSO data point, 15–24-year-olds are the age group most affected by fixed-term contracts, with a quarter of them employed under this arrangement, compared with 8.6% of all employees. Part of this mobility is therefore not chosen but structural, stemming from the very nature of entry-level jobs. The second indicator concerns work organisation. Remote work, marginal before the pandemic, has become a lasting feature, with 37% of Swiss workers now using it at least occasionally, compared with 24.6% in 2019. This normalisation affects all generations, but it has especially reshaped the expectations of young workers, for whom flexibility in location and working hours tends to be seen as a standard feature of employment rather than a negotiable perk. Situations remain highly uneven depending on the occupation, however, because an executive whose work can be done remotely does not have the same room for manoeuvre as an employee in industry, retail, or healthcare. This is a reminder that speaking of “youth” as a homogeneous group obscures a far more diverse professional reality. The third element is more cyclical, but it sheds light on the climate in which these expectations take shape: the unemployment rate for 15–24-year-olds, as defined by the ILO, stood at 10.5% in the third quarter of 2025, compared with an overall rate of 5.1% for the Swiss labour force as a whole over the same period. This makes entering the labour market more uncertain for this age group than for older workers, and therefore tempers the image of a generation negotiating from a position of broad-based strength.
These data describe power balances and objective conditions; they do not directly show how young workers rank their priorities. On this point, a Deloitte study conducted in 2024 among 400 members of Generation Z and the millennial generation in Switzerland provides useful insight. Contrary to a widely held belief, salary ranks only tenth among the criteria Generation Z uses to choose an employer (13%), well behind work-life balance (26%) and opportunities for learning and development (19%). This finding, drawn from a limited and dated Swiss sample, cannot be generalised without caution, but it confirms a broader trend: the issue is not so much an aversion to work as the nature of the return expected in exchange for that investment.
The real shift, therefore, lies less in the place assigned to work than in the relationship between employee and company. Young workers are willing to commit, but within a context of higher mobility, normalised flexibility, and a labour market that remains, statistically, harder for them to enter. For the new generations, staying with one company is no longer an end in itself; loyalty is now built around a shared interest: learning, advancing, and being able to preserve a life outside the office.
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