19.7.2026<\/p>\n
For two years now, the dominant anxiety among experienced professionals has sounded much the same: AI is coming for my job, and my age makes me the easiest target.<\/p>\n
The latest Swiss data tell a different story. In fact, almost the opposite one.<\/p>\n
At the end of June, JobCloud published the first jobs.ch AI Report, one of the most comprehensive analyses of the Swiss labour market to date. It is based on 7.3 million job advertisements from jobs.ch, jobup.ch and JobScout24 covering the years 2019 to 2025, supplemented by surveys of more than 3'600 employees and around 850 Swiss companies, across 18 occupational categories and 19 regions.<\/p>\n
The central finding is not that AI is destroying jobs. It is that AI is redistributing them. And the redistribution runs along a line that hardly anyone anticipated: not between industries, but between career levels.<\/p>\n
The report's most striking figure concerns entry-level positions. In 2025, the share of job advertisements for junior roles was 32 per cent below the average for the years 2019 to 2022, the period the report describes as the "pre-AI era".<\/p>\n
The mechanism is straightforward. AI tools are taking over precisely the tasks that junior staff traditionally performed: research, drafts, data preparation, routine analysis, first versions of almost everything. When a tool produces in seconds what a junior used to produce in a day, companies hire fewer juniors. The decline is most pronounced in what the report calls AI-exposed occupations: roles in administration, HR, banking, finance, marketing, procurement, sales and IT. Together, these fields account for 44 per cent of all advertisements analysed.<\/p>\n
While junior advertisements were shrinking, something else was happening that received far less attention: the share of senior profiles in Swiss job advertisements rose by 26 per cent.<\/p>\n
Read those two figures together. Junior demand down 32 per cent. Senior demand up 26 per cent. This is not a labour market that penalises experience. It is a labour market that is repricing experience, upwards.<\/p>\n
The logic behind the shift becomes clear when you consider what AI is genuinely good at and what it is not.<\/p>\n
AI produces output. It drafts, summarises, calculates and generates at remarkable speed. What it cannot do is know whether the output is correct, whether it fits the context, whether the client will accept it, whether the regulatory environment permits it, or whether the strategy behind it makes sense. Every AI-generated draft needs someone who can assess it. Every automated analysis needs someone who knows which question was the right one in the first place.<\/p>\n
That capacity for judgement is precisely what two or three decades of professional experience produce. Pattern recognition across market cycles. The ability to sense when something looks right but is wrong. Knowing which stakeholder needs to be involved before a decision, not after it. An instinct for what a board will actually approve. None of this appears in the training data, because it was never written down. It lives in people.<\/p>\n
Companies appear to have grasped this faster than the public debate has. They are cutting the level at which AI substitutes and reinforcing the level at which AI requires oversight. The result is the pattern in the data: fewer juniors, more seniors.<\/p>\n
The report's scarcity index measures the relationship between demand for an occupation and the available supply of talent. Between 2023 and 2025, this index fell by 69 per cent for AI-exposed office and knowledge occupations. In plain terms: positions in marketing, administration, finance or IT have become dramatically easier for companies to fill. More candidates, less scarcity, a weaker negotiating position.<\/p>\n
For less AI-exposed occupations, often practical, technical and care-related roles, the index rose by 19 per cent over the same period. A qualified nursing professional is eight times harder to find today than in 2023. The Adecco Job Index for Q2 2026 confirms the same divide: healthcare occupations grew by 17 per cent and skilled workers in trades and industry by 12 per cent, while scientific occupations declined by 18 per cent, academic occupations by 12 per cent and office staff by 6 per cent.<\/p>\n
For executives in transition, this is relevant for a particular reason. Many of our clients come from precisely the AI-exposed fields: finance, banking, marketing, administration, IT leadership. Anyone competing in these fields at the commodity level, on the strength of a CV in a pile of applications, is competing in the segment where the pile has grown fastest. JobCloud's own platform data show that applications per advertisement rose by up to 50 per cent this spring.<\/p>\n
Anyone competing at the level of judgement, however, as the person who steers, leads and assures the quality of what AI and leaner teams produce, stands on the other side of the divide. The same field, an entirely different market position. The difference is not the industry. It is the altitude.<\/p>\n
Three concrete conclusions emerge from the data for experienced executives currently navigating a transition.<\/p>\n
First: retire the sentence "AI is making my experience worthless". The Swiss figures say the opposite. Experience is the scarce complement to AI, not its victim. Those under genuine structural pressure are the people whose work consisted mainly of producing routine output, and that was never an executive's job description. Your positioning, on LinkedIn, in conversations, in interviews, should reflect this with confidence: you are not competing with the tools. You are the person companies need precisely because the tools exist.<\/p>\n
Second: make your judgement visible, not just your history. As we wrote in our article on board expectations, the market has moved away from assessing what executives have done towards asking how they think and decide. The AI transition sharpens this further. A career narrative made up of titles and tenures describes the past. A narrative made up of decisions taken under uncertainty, transformations led and quality judged under pressure describes exactly the capability that is currently gaining in value. The difference between those two narratives is the difference between the shrinking and the growing side of the market.<\/p>\n
Third: address the AI question before anyone asks it. The senior professionals who benefit most from this shift are those who can credibly steer the technology. Not necessarily use it at expert level, but ask the right questions about risk, quality and organisational impact. If your profile and your conversations make no reference to how you think about AI in your function, you leave open a gap that a 45-year-old competitor will happily fill. If you do address it, you combine the two scarcest goods in the current market: mature judgement and demonstrated adaptability.<\/p>\n
The report itself raises a concern that deserves to be taken seriously. If companies stop hiring juniors, they shrink the pipeline from which tomorrow's experts emerge, in a country already facing a structural shortfall of 400'000 workers over the coming decade. Today's hiring pattern is tomorrow's experience gap. Companies that cut the bottom of the ladder entirely will pay for it at the top.<\/p>\n
But that is a problem of corporate workforce planning. For the individual executive in transition, the signal in the data is unambiguous, and it is better news than the public AI debate would suggest.<\/p>\n
The market is not asking whether you are young enough for the future. It is asking whether your experience is visible enough for the present.<\/p>\n
At Grass & Partner, we support executives and senior managers through career transitions, with a particular focus on making experience visible, relevant and valued. If you or someone in your network is going through a career transition, we are here to help. Contact us at https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/kontakt\/<\/a><\/p>\n Sources: JobCloud, jobs.ch AI Report 2026 (7.3 million job advertisements 2019 to 2025, surveys of 3'600 employees and 850 companies), June 2026; JobCloud, Q2 2026 labour market update, July 2026; Adecco Group Swiss Job Market Index Q2 2026 \/ Stellenmarkt-Monitor of the University of Zurich; SECO, "Die Lage auf dem Arbeitsmarkt", June 2026; Swiss National Bank, Employment Outlook, July 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For two years now, the dominant anxiety among experienced professionals has sounded much the same: AI is coming for my job, and my age makes me the easiest target.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":8087,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-monday-brief"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grassgroup.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}