As many threads had already discussed, there is a facilitated admission for non-EU graduates to get work-permits. This case, the employer can bypass the complicated process to apply for a visa for non-EU if they have Swiss diploma and just finish within 6 months.
Here, my question is: can the company take advantage of this facilitated admission already before the candidate officially graduates?
I am a non-EU PhD student and going to have my PhD defense in the end of January. It means I can only get the official Swiss diploma and doctorate title sometime in February. However, the company wants me to start ideally on February 1st and now they want to start my visa application process.
In this case, is there any way to still take advantage of this facilitated admission without official diploma? Anyone has similar experience?
I think that would probably fall in a grey zone that the law and directives won't address specifically, so your best bet would be to contact the SEM and/or cantonal administration to know what their stance is. But it's anyway the employer who will have to go trough the process.
Hello, diplomas are fancy things to hang in the wall that you may get a long time after you complete all the requisites for the title. If I remember the list comprises: signatures from committee, signature from professor, being a registered student (semester fee) and thesis accepted by uni library. Once you get that done, you may as a letter from university department that more or less says "zhmle has fulfilled all the requisites towards the degree and he's a PhD in _____ for all intents and purposes".
When I finished, I missed a deadline for submitting thesis to library by 1 week and that caused a delay of 1+ year for the diploma. Anyway, I had fulfilled all the requisites and started to work right away.
In my case, when the company applied before the thesis defense, the application was rejected (Zurich). When I defended the thesis and had a confirmation for it, the (new) application was approved.