So I thought I would look up definitions of what is meant by a ‘professional’ on the Web / Wikipedia and these include:
- engaged in a profession or engaging in as a profession or means of livelihood; "the professional man or woman possesses distinctive qualifications
- a person engaged in one of the learned professions
- an athlete who plays for pay
- master: an authority qualified to teach apprentices (in a profession)
Effectively a professional is anyone who has studied some distinctive and recognised area, that requires some form of study, and now qualification, with standards of performance or delivery. Most important for us all, the professional is governed by a Charter or Statute that states how they should conduct themselves, with Codes of Conduct and so forth. My list of professionals would obviously start with:
- Solicitor - Accountant
- Patent agent - Surveyor
- Architect - Doctor
- Dentist - And your profession?
However over the last 30+ years Chartered or Institutional status has been granted to a growing number of business and personal activities, which now include extended areas of medicine, accounting, law, marketing, HR, IT etc., and of course a broad catchall: management consultancy.
The Governance, Code of Ethics, Practising Certificates, Professional Indemnity insurance, etc., are what assure the consumers of the services provided by the professional will abide by the requirements of their stated profession. It implies that if there were any unethical behaviour,sanctions of some sort would be imposed by the relevant professional body – which has the ‘teeth’ to do this. How often have you heard of Marketing or IT Consultants being struck off or have been forced to cease trading due to unethical behaviour? Even Doctors who have by all accounts acted negligently don’t get struck off for many years, but rather are suspended, pending investigations that seem to take years: and all on full pay! These are not sanctions – but loopholes for the incompetent to skip through.
How good is your ‘gut feeling’?
At the heart of our personal relationship with any professional is whether we trust them which we assess through a ‘gut feeling’. We have gone to them as the ‘learned professional’ who will offer good, solid advice and guidance in their area of specialism: that is a given. Key to whether we follow that advice or not, is whether, by their demeanour we, the punter in the street believe the professional is acting in our best interest justifying our trust. Are they trustworthy and ethical, we ask ourselves? If the answer is yes, wonderful, but too often now, there are people purporting to be honourable, but in truth are not.
Is being a professional still valuable coinage?
Is it really valuable to you and me that we have advice provided by a professional if there are inadequate regulations to remove those who simply are untrustworthy? Would we get just as good advice from someone with sound common sense? Are we yet again offering to the world an empty promise, an Emperor with his new clothes which simply does not ensure we are getting what we believe we should from our professionals? Probably our reticence to raise our concerns stops the relevant complaints being raised to the chartered institutes, or bodies, so they, in fact do not know the scale of the problem.
Years ago I remember when the Manpower Services Commissions were replaced by the Training and Enterprise Councils (and are now Business Links). They set up selection criteria to appoint a range of consultants and professionals to their books as reputable organisations to whom clients could go for sound business advice. In fact the key criteria was: did that consultant organisation have £200 – if yes, they could pass Go! There was no rigorous criteria, no proper referencing, no scrutiny - so where then, was the value?
Our inveterate desire to regulate everything now, is so overblown that maybe it has become unworkable and we individually, should be more discerning, and less reliant on regulation, in any dealing with a professional person. I believe there should be two thrusts here:
- There should be greater self regulation within and between professional bodies, where individual misdemeanours should be exposed and addressed; and
- The consumer of professional services should be less trusting and more testing of the ethical codes, before assuming their existence.
By that I mean that just because someone qualified as a solicitor, banker, mediator, or an insurance broker, does not mean that in your dealings with them today (maybe in their capacity as a consultant) you should assume they still meet the professionals Codes of Ethics or Conduct of their original profession.
Cleaning up the Professional Image:
For many reasons, we are going into an era where each of us could be taking on a second or third career because we need to carry on working till we are 70, we should be even more protective of the word professional, and clearer about what that really means. Professional practices should emphasise the values of trustworthiness, integrity and honour when recruiting not only trainees, but any lateral hire. Where there are regulatory bodies they should sharpen their teeth, and professions should resist the desire to protect ‘their own’ in white washes, and so hide unacceptable behaviours.
Now is the time to polish up that professional image so that consumers will pay for that sparkling, shinning knight image – of our true professional saviour.