Swiss Beauty & Hair Academy

Swiss Beauty and Hair Academy is the best-credentialled Swiss provider in this directory: it holds eduQua certification, the national quality mark for adult education providers, and states that its training is guided by CoiffureSuisse, the Swiss professional hairdressers’ association. It teaches from Schwamendingen in Zürich with a second campus in Lausanne.

The relevant programme is Men’s Hairdressing and Barbering at 12 months, sitting alongside unisex hairdressing at 18 months and ladies’ hairdressing at 12. Refresher courses run from a minimum of one month and can be customised, and specialisation courses are offered in barbering, haircutting and colorimetry. Teaching is in small groups and multilingual, which matters in a country with four national languages and a large international workforce. Fees are not published, but the payment terms are: monthly instalments are available on any course of two months or more, or you can take a three per cent discount for paying in full within five days of registering. Note that eduQua certifies the provider rather than awarding a trade qualification, and no federal EFZ route is claimed.

On Swiss credentials: Coiffeur is a regulated trade and the state qualifications are the federal EFZ apprenticeship and, above it, the Eidgenössischer Fachausweis. None of the private barber academies here offers either. The quality mark that does appear is eduQua, the Swiss standard for adult education providers, worth having, but a provider-quality certification rather than a trade qualification.