This is a relatively new concept. For most of the last millennium, there were only a few professions, for instance law and medicine.

Real professions have historically been distinguished by several factors:

Limited Practice. Only people who have proper educational credentials and who have been admitted to the profession by its members are allowed to practice that profession. For real professions, the law upholds this exclusivity (and other s elf-governance features, too).

Code of Ethics. Each real profession enforces a published code of ethics for its members, who must comply or lose their privilege to practice.

Specialization. Professionals are responsible for maintaining their own skills and knowledge at a state-of-the art level. As knowledge in all professions grows, practitioners have chosen to manage this daunting task by narrowing their field of expertise, thus limiting their updates to just that area. Evidence that this is a personal responsibility of professionals is their exposure to lawsuits for malpractice; real professionals must carry insurance against this risk.

Professional Autonomy. Perhaps because of their special personal liability, real professionals cannot put themselves in a position that might cause them to take orders from people outside their professions. Even military doctors and lawyers report to officers who are doctors and lawyers. Professionals must also maintain an arms-length relationship with their customers (whom they call clients, or patients, but never customers) because they can’t allow themselves to be put in the position of taking orders from one of these people. Professionals must make independent decisions about their actions, decisions that will be supported by others in the same profession.

In the mid-twentieth century, it became evident in America that, to continue our technological growth, to win the arms race and the space race, most children would have to have a college education. That was a brand new concept to families in the 1950’s. By the late 1960’s many more kids were going to college. The idea that people in jobs ought to act like professionals was introduced. The metaphor caught like wildfire. Now there are countless voluntary “professional associations” representing thousands of job categories.

In its Code of Ethics project, the Illinois Institute of Technology has collected over 850 such codes ( http://csep.iit.edu/codes/codes.html). There just aren’t that many professions.

Look again at the criteria for professionals. Most businesses don’t want – or even allow – many of those behaviors.

Professionalism has provided a useful transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. But it has also outlived its usefulness and, today, creates great barriers inside our organizations. Most of us never were real professionals. It’s time to give up the pretense.