Is ‘being a professional’ something today’s young business students care about? Do they aspire to become one?
These are questions I’ve recently been asking myself. Certainly, I’d like to think the answer is ‘yes’, but hoping doesn’t make it so.
It’s been suggested to me that when some young people think ‘professional’ they think: stuffy corporate types in white shirts…and they don’t want any part of it. There’s probably some truth to that, but my hope is that that point-of-view has a limited following.
I suspect that professionalism has not been fully appreciated–let alone understood well–by many of our young people.
In The Power of Professionalism I advance the premise that being a professional has little to do with the color of one’s collar. In other words, being a professional is an equal opportunity aspiration. Your education, your pedigree, your so-called profession, the letters that may follow your name have little to do whether you’re considered by others to be a professional or not.
In short: being a professional isn’t about what we do, it’s about how we do it.
My experience tells me that the being considered a consummate professional is perhaps the greatest compliment any one of us can receive in the workplace —at least for people over thirty.
But what about for younger people—particularly younger business students? Is ‘professional’ something they aspire to? Young people, weigh in!
NOTE: We’d like as many young people to weigh-in on this question as possible, please share freely amongst the young people you know.