Moving to Switzerland: The How, When and Where
I moved to Basel in January 2019 back when the world was arguably a simpler place. COVID-19 was still a good way off and troubles Ukraine had long fallen out of the news. Brexit was still one of the hot topics of conversation, however, and was what had really given me the push I needed to leave Southampton.
So what lead me to Switzerland, and why Basel? Well the idea first moving to CH goes back to my childhood. I am lucky enough to have an aunt who has herself become Swiss having lived here well over 20 years and as a pre-teen I was able to come and visit on holiday year after year. While no-one could claim Zürich is a cheap place to visit, cutting out the costs of the accommodation made it much more accessible and we are able to come and enjoy a taste of things in both the winter and the summer. For 15+ years Swizerland would just sit there in the back of my mind as a collection of happy memories and a vague notion that I could see myself living there one day.
Fast-forward to 2018 and I was 28, living in Southampton and working on the edge of Bournemouth for a little telecomms company as the wise old man Senior Software Engineer looking after a group of developers in their early 20s. We did a ton of .NET and web stuff with Microsoft Dynamics CRM/Dynamics 365 and were migrating over to the cloud and with it the exciting world of Azure.
During a short holiday I went along with one of my best mates, Dan, to visit his then-girlfriend in Zürich. It was great to relive my childhood, seeing parts of the city and country I vaguely remembered, and I got meet her group of expat friends. This then made me start thinking - if they had done it and moved out to Switzerland, why couldn’t I? Besides, it was never going to get any easier with the Brexit deadline looming.
I got home, updated LinkedIn and waited for the Zürich jobs to start rolling in… and nothing. For several sad months. I did realise it would be harder than trying to find something as a developer in the UK, after all, the only German I spoke was what I could still remember from school. Still, the wait was tough and I started to think it just wasn’t going to happen.
It got all the way to November (6 months later) and I’d still only exchanged a few messages with recruiters and had a phone call with one hiring manager. Then finally, I got one! It was a big risk, just a 6 week contract with a bank in Basel to try and prove myself, but it was a foot in the door so I jumped at the chance. Four short weeks later I was in Basel, and 3 and a half years after that I still think it was the single best decision I ever made.
Image credits:
- Basel header image by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash
- Basel map edited from Vemaps.com
- Zürich image by Henrique Ferreira on Unsplash