Are ICT Professionals “Professionals”?

ICT Professionals does not have the same status as medication, the law and other. Computing, with its sub-disciplines, for example, software engineering has not yet emerged as a fully-fledged profession. However, ICT professionals certainly possess some of the proper characteristics.

For example, mastered an esoteric body of knowledge. A professional usually needs to acquire knowledge that is usually obtained at University and it should also keep knowledge up-to-date.

• ICT professionals have varying degrees of autonomy. Those who own their own consulting practice, managers in industry or decision makers in government departments may have a good deal of autonomy. On the other hand many computer professionals have little autonomy. For example, programmers may simply implement the design of others. Additionally they usually work in teams or on small sections of large projects and thereby are distanced from the effects of their work.
  

• ICT professionals face all sorts of ethical dilemmas in their everyday working life. They have four types of obligation to: (1) society, (2) their employers, (3) their clients and (4) co-professionals and their organization. Ethical conflicts may arise through dual obligations but are most likely to occur between the interests of society and employer. Increasingly employed by large organizations, professional employees are less able to pursue the interests of their profession. certainly, they are expected to be loyal first and foremost to their employer.
  

• There are some codes of ethics of professional bodies for computer specialists, for example, the British Computer Society (BCS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). However, in the UK for example, although the BCS possesses a Royal Charter, there is no single organization recognized as the legal body in charge of admission or standards in the field of computing. These organizations are viewed as offering assistance to computer professionals to cope with ethical conflicts that maybe invoked in their everyday working life.

• As for fulfilling a social function, it seems clear that computing is now a crucial part of society, but computing is not a good in itself in the way health and justice are. Computing is an activity that supports social institutions and professions, which in turn are aimed at fulfilling a variety of social functions.
  

In conclusion, it seems that computing does not fit in the classic paradigm as do medicine and law. However, computing professionals are much closer to the paradigm than, for example, stockbrokers or carpenters or bus drivers.