Ask the trade whether there are enough watchmakers left to service everything it has sold, and the answer usually arrives as a story: an eight-month wait for a service, an old bench emptied by retirement, a school that used to exist and doesn’t. Switzerland’s own watch-industry employers’ association did not settle for the story. Twice a decade, it counts.

The number, and the arithmetic behind it

The Convention patronale de l’industrie horlogere suisse (CPIH) — the industry’s own employers’ body, not a regulator or an outside consultancy — runs a workforce-needs survey roughly every five years. Its sixth edition, published 21 November 2022, put a figure on what the trade would need to hire and train by 2026: 3,835 additional qualified staff — 1,466 of them for net growth, 2,369 to replace people retiring.

Do the arithmetic CPIH has already done: 2,369 of 3,835 is 62%. Three in every five people the trade says it needs between now and 2026 exist to stand in for somebody leaving, not to grow anything. This is a maintenance number wearing a growth number’s headline.

It is also accelerating. CPIH’s own comparison: the 2016 survey found training needs rising by 3% over the following five years. The 2022 survey found 12.5% — four times the rate, in the same kind of survey, six years apart. The fastest-growing specific categories, per CPIH’s own release: CNC finishing technicians (+54%), microtechnology quality controllers (+24%), watchmaking operators (+18%). None of those is an entry-level polishing job; all three sit close to where a watch is actually made, or actually opened.

What the headcount is doing while nobody is looking

CPIH also runs the industry’s own employment census, and the most recent one, for September 2025, records the first annual decline since the post-Covid period: 64,807 employees, down 835 (-1.3%) on September 2024. For scale, the 2009 crash cost the industry 4,203 jobs in a single year (-7.9%); this is a much smaller wobble, and CPIH’s own release frames it that way.

One line in the same release cuts against the alarm rather than for it: the number of apprentices is rising, not falling — 1,685 people, 2.7% of the workforce, and CPIH’s own release uses the word “progressing.” Whatever last year’s dip is about — and CPIH’s other numbers point at demand rather than training capacity — the industry is not visibly starving its own pipeline on purpose. It is running that pipeline into a hole dug mostly by retirement, which is a different problem with a longer fuse.

Why the pipeline is thin as well as slow

A general watchmaking certificate does not make somebody able to service most of what the industry actually sells, and the brands have said so themselves, on the record, to a competition authority.

Audemars Piguet told the European Commission, in a submission of 22 December 2011, that “the competence required so as to repair an Audemars Piguet watch is not acquired during the training somebody undergoes so as to get a general degree in the field, but it is only acquired following specialised training provided by the brand itself” — a statement made to justify AP’s own selective-repair system, not to describe a problem, but the plainest official confirmation available that general certification and brand-specific competence are two different things (European Commission, Decision C(2014) 5462 final, Case AT.39097, paragraph 95, footnote 97).

Patek Philippe’s own site makes the shape of that gap explicit rather than leaving it to inference. Four tiers, each requiring brand-specific training on top of whatever came before: Essential (retailer-level maintenance), Classic (full overhaul of simpler movements, minimum five years’ training), Complications (Annual Calendar, World Time and chronograph movements, minimum seven years), Grand Complications (perpetual calendars and beyond). Patek states plainly that reaching the top tier takes “at least 10 to 12 years,” with a minimum of 36 months’ practice required between tiers and a mandatory refresher course every four years. Someone starting that ladder in 2026 does not reach the top of it before the mid-2030s at the earliest — a specialist workforce cannot be summoned faster than its own training schedule allows, whatever a headcount survey says the trade needs in the meantime.

WOSTEP — the industry’s own shared training foundation, founded in 1966 to run a one-year course for North American watchmakers, and now a foundation with over 100 member organisations spanning brands, movement makers, retailers and toolmakers — states on its own site that certificates from its courses are “recognised by the Employers’ Convention of the Swiss Watch Industry (CP)” — the very same CPIH whose census opens this piece. According to FH’s own profile of WOSTEP, published 16 March 2023, more than 600 watchmakers have graduated from WOSTEP’s own Neuchatel programme, and roughly 2,700 more have certified through its partner schools worldwide. That is not the whole training pipeline — Patek, Rolex and Richemont’s Maisons all run further in-house institutes of their own, counted nowhere in WOSTEP’s numbers, and no publisher anywhere totals the industry’s full training output. But WOSTEP is the only shared, brand-neutral figure anybody publishes, and against it: a foundation that has certified roughly 3,300 watchmakers across nearly six decades sits awkwardly next to a single five-year window in which the trade says it needs to replace 2,369 people through retirement alone.

What “selective repair” actually replaced

This is where the thin pipeline meets a story this masthead has already told, and the record explains the causation rather than just the correlation.

The European Commission’s own decision states, at paragraph 134, that “the watch manufacturers have explained that the increased complexity of mechanical watches, as well as the decrease of qualified watchmakers following the ‘quartz revolution’ in the 80s, has led to the implementation of selective repair and maintenance systems.” In the same paragraph, Richemont’s own submission states that “the average time of repair has doubled over the last 10 years,” as of 2012; Audemars Piguet’s submission notes it manages “as many as 400 movements, of different functions and sizes.”

That is the brands’ own explanation, footnoted to their own regulatory submissions, for why the modern service architecture — examined and left standing by the European Commission, the General Court and Switzerland’s COMCO, and covered at length in our earlier piece on the parts embargo — exists at all. On the brands’ own account, the quartz crisis did not just shrink the industry; it gutted the pool of people qualified to fix what was left, and selective, brand-trained repair networks were the answer that emerged.

Switzerland’s competition authority heard the same pattern described from the other side, in the words of the independent watchmakers’ trade association it interviewed for its 2018 report: “in recent years, watch companies’ after-sales departments have been rebuilt into logistical competence centres… [and] have little to do with traditional watch repair as carried out in individual traditional workshops and high-end manufactures” (paragraph 105 — the association’s characterisation, recorded by COMCO, not COMCO’s own finding). The same report records, at paragraph 40, a contract clause requiring one manufacturer’s repairers to complete mandatory brand training before they are given access to spare parts for in-house movements at all: training is not a courtesy extended to authorised repairers, it is the gate itself.

What it costs, where anybody actually says

Two brands publish enough to check. Longines’ own customer-service pricing page — reachable only via an archived capture; the live page did not load for this piece over several attempts — lists a full service on a two- or three-hand mechanical watch at $350, and on a mechanical chronograph at $460, with a 24-month warranty on the work. Patek Philippe’s own service page says a full overhaul “may take weeks, depending on the model, the complexity of the movement, and the number of specialist interventions required,” without naming a price. COMCO’s 2018 report separately records the independent watchmakers’ own estimate of full-revision turnaround at the big brands: “two to three weeks up to half a year or more, depending on the brand.”

Rolex and Tudor publish neither price nor turnaround anywhere this piece could reach; both sites returned an access-denied response on every path tried, and no archived capture of either brand’s service pages could be located either. That gap is a research note, not a finding — the two brands that dominate the secondary market simply do not put numbers where a reader, or this masthead, can check them.

Where the alarm gets ahead of the evidence

The framing “a shortage nobody priced in” survives less well than the underlying numbers do, and the correction comes from the industry’s own survey data rather than from goodwill.

Deloitte’s Swiss Watch Industry Study — an annual survey of, in the 2025 edition, 111 senior industry executives, fielded June-July 2025 — ranked “shortage of qualified labour” as the single most-cited risk factor among executives in its 2023 edition. It does not appear in the top five risk factors at all in 2025. The list that replaced it: the strength of the Swiss franc, weaker foreign demand, consumers’ falling purchasing power, and the rising gold price. Deloitte’s own text is blunt about the shift: “concerns about labour shortages and rising labour costs, which figured prominently in 2023, have receded. Companies are more focused on external pressures and global instability.” The people closest to the hiring problem rated it lower in 2025 than in 2023 — the opposite of what “a shortage nobody priced in” predicts should be happening as the CPIH’s own 2026 deadline gets closer.

And the apprentice figure from earlier is worth repeating here rather than only in passing: it rose to 2.7% of the workforce even as total headcount fell. Whatever cut those 835 jobs in 2025, it was not the training pipeline being starved on purpose.

Verdict

The number is real, it is precise, and almost nobody outside the trade’s own French-language press quotes it: 3,835 people needed by 2026, three in five of them there only to stand in for someone retiring, against a shared training foundation that has certified roughly 3,300 watchmakers across nearly six decades. The pipeline is also structurally slow in a way no hiring push fixes quickly — a decade to the top of Patek’s own ladder — and the brands’ own regulatory filings say plainly that this is not new: the quartz crisis of the 1980s is, on their account, the reason general certification stopped being sufficient and brand-run training became the gate to a brand’s own parts.

Our read: this is a genuine structural problem, correctly counted by the one body positioned to count it, and it is not the acute crisis the framing implies. Executives who live with the hiring problem ranked it below currency and demand pressure by 2025. Apprentice numbers are rising, not falling. The shortage the industry itself measured is a slow-moving, mostly demographic one — retirements outrunning replacements by a ratio of three to two — dressed up in trade coverage as something more dramatic than the trade’s own executives currently think it is.

What is not claimed here

That watchmaker numbers are falling in any country outside Switzerland as a matter of counted fact: no register was found for any market outside CPIH’s own Swiss census, and the widely repeated US figures — a fall from around 44,000 watchmakers in 1953 to about 6,500 today, and an average working age of 62 — could not be traced to any AWCI publication or a specific government statistical series; both are in the ledger. Nor that ten watchmaking jobs sit open for every watchmaker available, a ratio attributed on record to AWCI’s director of education in trade coverage but not published by AWCI itself. Nor that Rolex or Tudor service more slowly or more expensively than Longines or Patek: neither publishes enough to compare. And not that the industry deliberately under-trains its own workforce — CPIH’s own numbers, an accelerating rather than flat need count and rising apprentice enrolment, describe a trade that has counted its problem accurately and is, by its own record, responding to it.