What are the tech hiring trends for 2026?

An overview of demand in the Swiss IT recruitment sector going towards 2026

Last week I had an especially packed week of 31 meetings with clients and candidates across Luzern, Basel and Zürich!

They almost all asked me this question, so here it is answered for everyone else:

How do you see the market and what are the IT hiring trends in Switzerland going to be in 2026?

Well after more than 15 years in tech recruitment, I can tell you that things don't stay constant very long. But this is how I see things.

Large Swiss companies tend to be on a 4-6 year cycle of outsourcing/offshoring, reducing cost for a few years in a row, then something happens, normally a change in leadership, but it could also be a change to investing in increasing the top line rather than decreasing the bottom, or a realisation that the cost saving/offshoring wasn't as effective as hoped. Then they go through a push to bring everything back closer to home and regain control / push on again.

Normally companies/industries don't align their cycles with each other, so when one is quiet, a different one is busy, etc. However, covid changed all that. Everyone was busy in 2022, perhaps overly optimistic and over hiring. Since late 2023, there's been a general slowdown caused by the following two factors:

• Economic global slowdown, uncertainty and conflicts
• The pace of tech change

Now I'm not a macro economist, so I'll focus on the second one!

Whatever your thoughts, we are going through a period of accelerated technology change. In the past 10 years AI has gone from being a fringe term and common sci-fi topic to part of our everyday life, especially in the form of LLM's.

This has created a hesitation amongst mid size companies to spend on building new systems, scared that they will become obsolete in a few years. This has promoted a shift to buy rather than build. As a 12 month subscription offers quicker uptime and easier cancellation than building up a tech team of developers over the course of years.

There has also been a move towards hyper specialisation amongst the vendors with smaller vendors often being preferred having increasingly targeted micro-niches rather than one size fits all.

In terms of what clients are hiring themselves, there has tended to be a divide with them either looking for top in class talent or all rounders. One of my favourite German words/sayings is the “eierlegende wollmilchsau”, which translates as the “egg-laying, wool-producing, milk-giving pig”... basically the Swiss Army Knife of talents who can do a bit of everything.

The tech areas that are trending towards being busy in 2026 are:

• Cyber Security – continues to be a key focus, especially with the prevalence of phishing/scams going on
• Cloud computing
• Data - Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence/Data Engineering/Business Intelligence – companies seem to be moving into adoption/exploration rather than just talking about it, but the vast majority are still just dipping their toes in rather than embracing it completely
• Specialist vendor softwares – there continues to be a demand for SAP, MS Dynamics, Service Now and Salesforce resources especially, but more for candidates who have good business knowledge and speak local languages than technical profiles

And the tech areas that will be struggling in 2026 will be:

• Software development – Java and C# especially have an abundance of people on the market
• General Business Analysts or Project Manager who don’t bring additional technical/system/functional knowledge to the table
• Juniors

I love getting out and meeting people, it's probably one of the favourite parts of my job, so look forward to meeting many more of you soon and please let me know your thoughts on my insights!