Advertising and the professions

Some occupational groups are composed of persons with advanced training in a systematic body of knowledge which they sell to individual members of the public. These occupations are sometimes called the ‘learned professions’ or the ‘self-regulating professions’. Craftsmen are not professionals in this sense, because their body of knowledge is not complex, nor are academics since they do not in general have individual clients. The classic examples of the self-regulating professions are the doctors and lawyers, but there are other groups such as architects and accountants which also meet the definition. A list of such professions is given in Table 1.