Courtesy : Bachelor of Education
A profession is a field of work that has been successfully professionalized. It can be defined as a disciplined group of individuals, professionals, who adhere to ethical standards and who hold themselves out as, and are accepted by the public as possessing special knowledge and skills in a widely recognized body of learning derived from research, education and training at a high level, and who are prepared to apply this knowledge and exercise these skills in the interest of others. # ISO certification in India
Professional occupations are founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested objective counsel and service to others, for a 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.A profession is not a trade and not an industry. # ISO certification in India
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. # ISO certification in India
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. # ISO certification in India
tymology
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”. # ISO certification in India
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 (note that 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. # ISO certification in India
