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What does it mean to be a professional, and what kind of knowledge underpins it?
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What does it mean to be a professional, and what kind of knowledge underpins it?
People working in communications have always struggled to define themselves as professionals, in the sense that accountants or lawyers do. There are professional societies, but they tend to have low membership and you can work as a graphic designer or editor without being a member or holding qualifications. Lawyers and doctors can’t do that.
In his seminal work on the sociology of professions,1 Andrew Abbott uses the medical model of diagnosis and treatment to describe how professionals deal with problems in the field. He sees it as essential for professions to align with academic fields in order to establish credibility.
But professionals don’t work by just applying knowledge found in books. They need tacit know-how, judgement and experience to get things right.
Abbott sees the practical application of inference as the real mark of a professional – applying professional knowledge appropriately to particular sets of circumstances. To be able to make inferences from available evidence requires there to be an underlying conceptual model of the problem the professional is dealing with. Lawyers and doctors have this. Information designers and writers often don’t.
If diagnosis and treatment are too routinised, solutions are just technical – the equivalent of a designer using a template.
On the other hand, one-off solutions without an underlying rationale are also a problem. Without insight into the reasons why it worked, one design task well done will have no further influence.
This can be an issue for graphic designers and information designers, who are sometimes thought to work just intuitively and atheoretically. And actually many are OK with that. The problem is that, not being seen as a regular profession, they don’t get consulted when government agencies or industry bodies draft regulations that involve information. That’s why you find all caps legalese in consumer contracts.
This page is adapted from:
Jenny Waller (2011) Professionalising functional communications: What practitioners need to know, Technical paper 12, The Simplification Centre
1. Abbott A (1988) The system of professions: an essay on the division of labor, University of Chicago Press.