A profession is a field of work that has been formally professionalized. It can be defined as a disciplined group of individuals, professionals, who adhere to ethical standards and are recognized by the public as possessing specialized knowledge and skills grounded in a widely recognized body of learning derived from advanced research, education, and training, and who apply this knowledge and exercise these skills in the interest of others.
Professional occupations are founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested objective counsel and service to others, for direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain.New Statesman, 21 April 1917, article by Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb quoted with approval at paragraph 123 of a report by the UK Competition Commission, dated 8 November 1977, entitled (in Chapter 7). Medieval and early modern tradition recognized only three professions: divinity, medicine, and law,Perks, R.W. (1993): Accounting and Society. London: Chapman & Hall; . p.2. which were called the learned professions.See for example: In some legal definitions, a profession is not a tradeJohn J Parker, "A Profession Not a Skilled Trade" (1955-1956) 8 South Carolina Law Quarterly 179 HeinOnline ; Sommerlad, Harris-Short, Vaughan and Young (eds), The Futures of Legal Education and the Legal Profession, Bloomsbury, 2015, p 147; Richard Colman, "Medicine is a profession not a trade" , British Medical Journal, 7 October 2001; A M Linz, "A profession, not a trade" (December 1990) New York State Dental Journal 56(10):16 PubMed ; E. G. Eberle, "The practice of medicine held to be a profession and not a trade" (August 1939) 28 Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association 482 Wiley ; Wendler, Tremml and Buecker (eds), Key Aspects of German Business Law: A Practical Manual, 2nd Ed, Springer, 2002, p 255; William F Ryan, "Methods of Achieving Professional Recognition" (1946) The American Engineer, vols 16-17, p 8 . nor an industry.(1961) 2 The Industrial and Labour Law Digest, 1926-1959, Annotated 668; Sharma and Goyal, Hospital Administration And Human Resource Management, 5th Ed, PHI Learning, p 445.
Some professions change slightly in status and power, but their prestige generally remains stable over time, even if the profession begins to have more required study and formal education. Disciplines formalized more recently, such as architecture, now have equally long periods of study associated with them.Holm, Ivar (2006): Ideas and Beliefs in Architecture and Industrial design: How attitudes, orientations and underlying assumptions shape the built environment. Oslo School of Architecture and Design. .
Although professions may enjoy relatively high status and public prestige, not all professionals earn high salaries, and even within specific professions there exist significant differences in salary. In law, for example, a corporate defense lawyer working on an hourly basis may earn several times what a prosecutor or public defender earns.
Etymology The term "profession" is a truncation of the term "liberal profession", which is, in turn, an Anglicization of the French term profession libérale. Originally borrowed by English users in the 19th century, it has been re-borrowed by international users from the late 20th, though the (upper-middle) class overtones of the term do not seem to survive re-translation: "liberal professions" are, according to the European Union's Directive on Recognition of Professional Qualifications (2005/36/EC), "those practised on the basis of relevant professional qualifications in a personal, responsible and professionally independent capacity by those providing intellectual and conceptual services in the interest of the client and the public". Under the European Commission, liberal professions are professions that require specialized training and that are regulated by "national governments or professional bodies".
Formation A profession arises through the process of professionalization when any trade or occupation transforms itself:"... [through] the development of formal qualifications based upon education, apprenticeship, and examinations, the emergence of regulatory bodies with powers to admit and discipline members, and some degree of monopoly rights.
Major milestones which may mark an occupation being identified as a profession include: an occupation becomes a full-time occupation the establishment of a training school the establishment of a university school the establishment of a local association the establishment of a national association of professional ethics the establishment of state licensing laws
Applying these milestones to the historical sequence of development in the United States shows surveying achieving professional status first (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln all worked as land surveyors before entering politics), followed by medicine, actuarial science, law, dentistry, civil engineering, logistics, architecture and accounting.
With the rise of technology and occupational specialization in the 19th century, other bodies began to claim professional status: mechanical engineering, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, psychology, nursing, teaching, librarianship, optometry and social work, each of which could claim, using these milestones, to have become professions by 1900.Buckley, J.W. & Buckley, M.H. (1974): The Accounting Profession. Melville, Los Angeles. Quoted by Perks, p.4.
Characteristics There is considerable agreement about defining the characteristic features of a profession. Professionals have a "professional association, cognitive base, institutionalized training, licensing, work autonomy, colleague control... (and) code of ethics",Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: a Sociological Analysis, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1978, p. 208 to which Larson adds, "high standards of professional and intellectual excellence",Larson, p. 221 that "professions are occupations with special power and prestige"Larson, p.x and that they comprise "an exclusive elite group"Larson, p. 20 in all societies. Joanne Brown defines members of a profession as "workers whose qualities of detachment, autonomy, and group allegiance are more extensive than those found among other groups...their attributes include a high degree of systematic knowledge; strong community orientation and loyalty; self-regulation; and a system of rewards defined and administered by the community of workers".Joanne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: the Authority of Metaphor in the History of Intelligence Testing, 1890-1930, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 19
Turner and Hodge have further defined a profession as: "a special type of occupation...(possessing) corporate solidarity...prolonged specialized training in a body of abstract knowledge, and a collectivity or service orientation...a vocational sub-culture which comprises implicit codes of behavior, generates an esprit de corps among members of the same profession, and ensures them certain occupational advantages...(also) bureaucratic structures and monopolistic privileges to perform certain types of work...professional literature, legislation, etc."
A critical characteristic of a profession is the need to cultivate and exercise professional discretion - that is, the ability to make case-by-case judgements that cannot be determined by an absolute rule or instruction.
Regulation
Regulatory organisations are typically charged with overseeing a defined industry. Usually they will have two general tasks:
creating, reviewing and amending standards expected of individuals and organisations within the industry. Intervening when there is a reasonable suspicion that a regulated individual or organisation may not be complying with its obligations.
Originally, any regulation of the professions was self-regulation through bodies such as the College of Physicians or the Inns of Court. With the growing role of government, statutory bodies have increasingly taken on this role, their members being appointed either by the profession or (increasingly) by the government. Proposals for the introduction or enhancement of statutory regulation may be welcomed by a profession as protecting clients and enhancing its quality and reputation, or as restricting access to the profession and hence enabling higher fees to be charged. It may be resisted as limiting the members' freedom to innovate or to practice as in their professional judgement they consider best.
An example was in 2008, when the British government proposed wide statutory regulation of psychologists. The inspiration for the change was a number of problems in the psychotherapy field, but there are various kinds of psychologists including many who have no clinical role, and where the case for regulation was not so clear. Work psychology brought especial disagreement, with the British Psychological Society favoring statutory regulation of "occupational psychologists" and the Association of Business Psychologists resisting the statutory regulation of "business psychologists" – descriptions of professional activity which it may not be easy to distinguish.
Besides regulating access to a profession, professional bodies may set examinations of competence and enforce adherence to an ethical code. There may be several such bodies for one profession in a single country, an example being the accountancy bodies of the United Kingdom (ACCA, CAI, CIMA, CIPFA, ICAEW and ICAS), all of which have been given a Royal Charter, although their members are not necessarily considered to hold equivalent qualifications, and which operate alongside further bodies (AAPA, IFA, CPAA). Another example of a regulatory body that governs a profession is the Hong Kong Professional Teachers Union, which governs the conduct, rights, obligations, and duties of salaried teachers working in educational institutions in Hong Kong.
The engineering profession is highly regulated in some countries (Canada and the United States) with a strict licensing system for Professional Engineer that controls the practice but not in others (UK) where titles and qualifications are regulated Chartered Engineer but the practice is not regulated.
Typically, individuals are required by law to be qualified by a local professional body before they are permitted to practice in that profession. However, in some countries, individuals may not be required by law to be qualified by such a professional body in order to practice, as is the case for accountancy in the United Kingdom (except for auditing and insolvency work which legally require qualification by a professional body). In such cases, qualification by the professional bodies is effectively still considered a prerequisite to practice as most employers and clients stipulate that the individual hold such qualifications before hiring their services. For example, in order to become a fully qualified teaching professional in Hong Kong working in a state or government-funded school, one needs to have successfully completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Education ("PGDE") or a bachelor's degree in Education ("BEd") at an approved tertiary educational institution or university. This requirement is set out by the Educational Department Bureau of Hong Kong, which is the governmental department that governs the Hong Kong education sector.
Autonomy