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I was just wondering. What do most of you consider as professional jobs?
I have always considered positions such as accountants, lawyers, engineers, programmers etc. as professional jobs. However, I never think of customer service managers, restaurant/retail managers, or clerical workers as "professional"
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Its a word I don't give much credence to. I definitely have known professional restaurant managers and customer service managers, and I don't know too many upper echelon C level supporting executive assistants that aren't professionals.
What do most of you consider as professional jobs?
I have always considered positions such as accountants, lawyers, engineers...
What are your thoughts?
The common theme, as in your examples above, is in having objective and legal standards
related to the work that the person is expected to uphold that go BEYOND what an employer
might expect (or want) them to do; and some sort of education, testing, licensing is required
to qualify for the title.
In the large corporations I've worked for, those designated as "professionals" are the employees who are on an annual salary, as opposed to paid by the hour. "Hourly employees" punched a clock and earned overtime pay beyond their 40 hours. Professionals (who may also have been required to clock in, just to prove they were on the premises for a minimum 40 hours a week) were the people contractually obligated to work overtime "as needed" without any additional remuneration and to perform duties "as assigned" without any legal protection.
"Comp time" was left up to bosses and, where I worked at least, rarely even asked for, let alone granted. I traveled a lot for my job, so if they knew I was at trade show where I might have been manning our booth, entertaining clients when I wasn't, and responsible for loading and transporting the booth and hand-outs, sometimes across the country, I'd leave early on a Friday to make up for what had easily been 80 hours the previous week. Or come in late the morning after my plane landed. Other than that, my responsibility was to take anything they dished out.
The people in my office who were hourly were secretaries, mail room, reproduction services, graphics department, security, those kinds of support services. Cleaning and cafeteria services were subcontracted and those people worked for other companies, no doubt hourly, too. The "professionals" were engineers, specialized technicians, and marketing people like me. Everyone else was a "manager." That elite corporate status usually has more to do with budgets they manage, rather than people. Since the corporation I worked for also owned manufacturing plants, those employees were unionized and, as a result, our hourly employees at headquarters enjoyed union representation, too. That also, in the end, helped us professionals. Even though we weren't in the union, they couldn't pay us less than they were paying the secretaries, so it helped to bump up our salaries. Otherwise, given how many hours I normally worked a week, it wouldn't have been financially "worth it" to be a professional.
When I was growing up, I would have said "professionals" were people like lawyers, architects, bankers, pharmacists — people who had degrees entitling them to perform work others weren't qualified to do. But now that practically everyone in the world works for a huge corporation, that's a very minimal number of people.
As soon as your first name isn't pinned/glued/embroidered onto your shirt.
What about a professional chef? Professional athlete? lol
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