Occupation, Profession, Vocation: Professional Identity and Status

Professional status is the golden ring for modern information workers. When someone is professional, that person gains more earning potential and imposes more influence within their community of practice. Moreover, professional workers gain status within their discipline that helps them to improve their working conditions and job tenure, in a manner unavailable to vocational workers. In 2002, Brenton Faber wrote an article examining professionalism and professional status for professional communicators. He concluded that professional communicators perform the functions of their discipline in guilds, exercise control over their discipline through coercive means, engage in political activism to protect their exclusive status to do that work, and limit access to discipline-specific knowledge to retain their elite status. This paper uses historical and modern-day journal articles to examine Faber’s claims, and identify strengths and weaknesses in his judgments about professional and technical communication. After evaluating Faber’s article, it will offer new definitions that modern technical communicators can use to evaluate their own professional status