Economy class: working remotely from another country for Swiss clients

One of the easiest ways to get started with the Swiss economy is to work remotely for a Swiss company from another country. This could be an excellent first step, e.g. if you are interested in Switzerland, but you are not sure if you want to move to Switzerland permanently at all or when.

Working remotely for Swiss clients works rather well in my opinion: The Swiss economy has already been used to outsource certain tasks to somewhere else because salaries are so comparatively high in Switzerland and because it is often difficult to find enough qualified people for a certain job at all.

This is different to its big neighbors like Germany or France, where you can find less expensive employees within the same country, just in a different city. So if you are based in Munich or Paris, you may not have to look for offshore or nearshore talent to save quite a bit. You still have less expensive cities where within the same country and might found some great remote work talents there.

On the other hand, if you are based in Zürich, your saving potential is not so high by recruiting remote workers from other parts of Switzerland since the salary differences are not as extreme as in some other countries.

For you as a potential remote worker, this means that you may have it easier to find a Swiss company accepting you as a remote worker from some place else. And of course, the COVID pandemic helped accelerate that too.



Business class: working remotely from within Switzerland

This is something that only a smaller percentage of people will be able to afford: Being both expensive, living in one of the most beautiful countries in the world and still not coming to the office every day. Just like only a smaller percentage of people can or want to afford flying business class.

On of the most straightforward variants of this is if your employer or client base is located in a big city such as Zürich or Geneva while you yourself live in a smaller city that is quite far away (so not just a suburb). If your employer is in Zürich for example, but you live in Luzern or in Schwyz to save on rent or taxes, it will make a lot of sense to work from home since the commute time per direction exceeds 45 minutes.

In this scenario, you basically get the best of both worlds in a sense: You are working for a Swiss company thus receiving a more attractive salary and benefits than you would in many other countries. And at the same time, you get the great quality of live of Switzerland, while you still don’t have to come to the office every day.

If you are a junior engineer or scientist, this might be a bit difficult to achieve. Some employers do not trust junior people enough to work remotely 95-100% of the time. But you can still start with working 60-80% of the time remotely and only coming physically into the office 1-2 per week or even less than that to build trust over time.

And of course, you should not underestimate that efficient remote work will require some learning on your end as well, so just give it a bit of time and trust that you will eventually make it to 100% remote work from within Switzerland for Swiss employers or clients - the “business class” as I call it.