College to Career



9

Professionalism

9.1 Introduction

Once you land a job, you will no doubt spend countless hours dreaming about the prospect of graduating from college and starting a new life soon as a ‘professional’. But many of us only have a vague idea of what a professional is and how we can become one. The popular notion is that professionals are mostly engineers, managers and information technologists who work for modern (and often unorthodox) organizations and earn a lot of money. It is also believed that being a professional is a passport to a good life.

But being a professional is not just about being employed by a multinational organization, doing a white-collar job in an air-conditioned office in front of a computer and ...