Profession
occupation requiring specialized training
A profession is a field of work that has been formally professionalized. It can be defined as a disciplined group of individuals, professionals, who adhere to ethical standards and are recognized by the public as possessing specialized knowledge and skills grounded in a widely recognized body of learning derived from advanced research, education, and training, and who apply this knowledge and exercise these skills in the interest of others.
Professional occupations are founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested objective counsel and service to others, for 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. In some legal definitions, a profession is not a trade nor an industry.
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.
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.
Etymology
The term "profession" is a truncation of the term "liberal profession", which is, in turn, an Anglicization of the French term profession libérale.
“Profession” enters the record as occupation requiring specialized training. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Profession, occupation and requiring can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Profession” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Profession, occupation and requiring provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28640. The Library of Congress control number is sh85107267. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Profession”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Profession primary sources, Profession archive and Profession research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Profession”?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Profession” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.