Drawing on a life-course perspective, this paper focuses on the analysis of the transnatio
nal education to employment transitions that particularly shows the interdependence of
professional and family trajectories in a migration context. I focus on Peruvian migration
to study in a Swiss Higher Education institution and subsequent job-hunting in the
Swiss labour market; and link them with transnational family configurations. I present
two types of life-courses found among highly skilled Peruvian men and women: the
concordance or discordance between education credentials and current employment
conditions. Although many studies have emphasised the problems of validating foreign
degrees as the greatest barrier for highly skilled foreigners, I argue that having a Swiss
degree does not automatically guarantee adequate employment for Peruvian men and
women in Switzerland. The findings clearly stress the ambivalent role of Swiss degrees
for migrants, as well as, the heterogeneous impact of partnership and parenthood. These
processes can be explained by different opportunities and limitations based on fields of
qualification and dynamic gender normativity in couple’s negotiations and employer
employee relations.