ABSTRACT
A fairly significant sub-category of professionally-qualified people end up working outside the boundaries of their professions: for example, in 1996, nearly 20 percent of qualified solicitors were in employment outside legal firms. Professionals with only short-term contracts could be labelled careerless. The size of the organization in which a professional decides to work makes a considerable difference to the nature of his or her career experience. The aspiration for any calling to qualify as a profession depends on the provision of special introductory training of an appropriate kind, in that no one could credibly claim to be a professional without such training. Very few respondents indicated, either in their actual career patterns or in their potential career developments, a sense that they were necessarily confined to one particular role in one particular location. One career in particular begins relatively late in life, so that its period of initial training comes long after the normal stage around one’s twenties.
