Today, there is no longer a general lack of professional (in-service) training opportunities, for example in investigative skills or data journalism, for Swiss journalists, as it was stated in the 2011 MDM report. Instead, there are many professional training possibilities, provided for instance by the Media Education Centre MAZ in Lucerne or the Zurich University of Applied Sciences ZHAW in Winterthur (see also Indicator C4 – Journalism professionalism). The main problem seems to be that professional further education for working journalists is not required or encouraged in most of the editorial offices. Education and advanced training in journalism is, therefore, left to individual discretion.
Only the public broadcaster SRG SSR runs an in-house training centre. SRG SSR puts effort into their professional training programme and calls upon its employees to benefit from internal and external programmes during their whole careers. Big publishing companies like Ringier AG also offered internal courses for their employees, but these have been cut back upon due to either lack of resources or of need (see Meier et al., 2011). TX Media at least provides expert tools dealing with journalistic practices like interviewing, computerised data-analysis, investigate, or data journalism. Furthermore, it offers an attractive three-week in-service training at the Columbia University, New York. But among the journalists we interviewed, one of them was severely critical of this in stating that a possibility of more men than women prevailed in receiving this possibility, and also that the selection criteria would be not transparent.
Taken together, there exists in most media or editorial offices no concrete management policy and institutionalised concepts for further professional education or advanced training in journalism even though there exists an abundance of possibilities and offerings. Therefore, here to, individual motivation is more crucial and instrumental.
