Even though Japan and Switzerland are characterised by comparatively low youth unemployment rates, non-standard forms of employment are on the rise, posing a risk to a stable integration of young labour market entrants. Drawing on the French approach of societal analysis, this paper investigates how country-specific school-to-work transition systems stratify the risk of non-standard employment in early career within and across both Japan and Switzerland. Our results reveal that in Japan young entrants who completed university education are least at risk of becoming employed in non-standard work. On the contrary, it is the highly educated university graduates who mainly enter the Swiss labour market via non-standard employment, while vocational education promotes smooth transitions into standard employment relationships in Switzerland. All in all, our findings suggest that a smooth integration of young entrants follows lines of distinctive institutionalised links between the educational systems and the labour markets in Japan and Switzerland. However, while job insecurities may not endanger labour market integration of highly skilled university graduates in Switzerland they may go hand in hand with social exclusion processes for the more peripheral young entrants concerned in Japan.