Profession


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. Medieval and early modern tradition recognized only three professions: divinity, medicine, and law, which were called the learned professions. In some legal definitions, a profession is not a trade nor an industry.
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.
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 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, "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:
"... 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:
  1. an occupation becomes a full-time occupation
  2. the establishment of a training school
  3. the establishment of a university school
  4. the establishment of a local association
  5. the establishment of a national association of professional ethics
  6. 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, 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.

Regulation

Regulatory organisations are typically charged with overseeing a defined industry. Usually they will have two general tasks:
  1. creating, reviewing and amending standards expected of individuals and organisations within the industry.
  2. 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 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, 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. 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 with a strict licensing system for Professional Engineer that controls the practice but not in others 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. 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 or a bachelor's degree in Education 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

Professions tend to be autonomous, which means they have a high degree of control of their own affairs: "professionals are autonomous insofar as they can make independent judgments about their work". This usually means "the freedom to exercise their professional judgement."
However, it also has other meanings. "Professional autonomy is often described as a claim of professionals that has to serve primarily their own interests...this professional autonomy can only be maintained if members of the profession subject their activities and decisions to a critical evaluation by other members of the profession." The concept of autonomy can therefore be seen to embrace not only judgement, but also self-interest and a continuous process of critical evaluation of ethics and procedures from within the profession itself.
One major implication of professional autonomy is the traditional ban on corporate practice of the professions, especially accounting, architecture, engineering, medicine, and law. This means that in many jurisdictions, these professionals cannot do business through regular for-profit corporations and raise capital rapidly through initial public offerings or flotations. Instead, if they wish to practice collectively they must form special business entities such as partnerships or professional corporations, which feature reduced protection against liability for professional negligence and severe limitations or outright prohibitions on ownership by non-professionals. The obvious implication of this is that all equity owners of the professional business entity must be professionals themselves. This avoids the possibility of a non-professional owner of the firm telling a professional how to do his or her job and thereby protects professional autonomy. The idea is that the only non-professional person who should be telling the professional what to do is the client; in other words, professional autonomy preserves the integrity of the two-party professional-client relationship. Above this client-professional relationship the profession requires the professional to use their autonomy to follow the rules of ethics that the profession requires. But because professional business entities are effectively locked out of the stock market, they tend to grow relatively slowly compared to public corporations.