PROFESSIONALIZATION OF THE POLITICAL ADVOCACY INDUSTRY: IMPROVEMENT CALLED FOR

The term profession essentially means a generic category of a particular type of occupation, usually one that involves knowledge, a service and an extended period of education, training and work experience with an experienced practitioner that has been practicing for a number of years. Professionalization is the process by which an occupation seeks to promote itself or is  promoted by external agents into a professional occupation. Professionalization is about movement towards becoming a profession. All occupations can exercise professionalism, but they cannot all professionalize and they cannot all become professions.

Without a unified sense of professional identity, practitioners in the field of public policy advocacy, government relations and public affairs are unlikely to make good progress toward professionalization. Professional consciousness depends on the active involvement of a community of practice. Professional consciousness exists when members identify with common practices, concerns, discourse and values, when they function as a culture. Our profession can only be a ‘true’ profession if all parties involved are united and committed to developing standardised, universal forms of public policy advocacy and government relations practice.

There are three elements that contribute to professionalism:

1. We’re the only ones who can do this
2. We control entry into the profession by certification and accreditation
3. We have a professional consciousness

While all occupations contain some blend of skills, knowledge, qualification and competence, professions involve a “special kind of knowledge believed to require the exercise of discretionary judgment and a grounding in abstract theory and concepts.  This powerful knowledge for practitioners is about competence in their subject and their special knowledge and understanding of and ability to teach and train in order to promote successful learning.

Individual professional identity is a pride in practice that is personal, private and situational. It requires a professional curiosity, commitment to continuous learning and acknowledgement that our expertise is always in need of expansion. Commitment to professional practice within a profession is not only personal but an obligation to the profession itself. Practitioners need to develop communities of professional practice, extending beyond their employing organisations where they can engage in developmental dialogues about the profession and those they serve.

Professionals and professional bodies such as AALEP have a powerful role to play as part of the improvement and self-improvement landscape. Professional bodies give the public, the sector and the government confidence that individual professionals will be striving to continuously improve their skills, knowledge and expertise to offer the highest quality and exemplary professional services they can to their learners. Professional bodies have the potential to really tap into and help ignite more enthusiasms and ambition among individuals; to develop, hone and strengthen their practice to benefit learners.

Many professions such as accounting, law, engineering and medicine have gone through the process of professionalisation. Ultimately, the professional status of a profession affects the prestige and rewards of everyone involved in a particular occupational group, and the proliferation of professions, or aspiring professions, has led to a sophisticated sociological debate on the nature and definition of a profession. A number of authors provide some guidelines on what constitutes a ‘profession’. However, Wylie (1994:1) summarises it in his interdisciplinary guidelines for a “profession” which generally include requirements for a well-defined body of scholarly knowledge; completion of some standardised and prescribed course of study; examination and certification by a state; and oversight by a state agency which has disciplinary powers of practitioners’ behaviours.

The future of the profession is in the hands of the professionals themselves as well as those who value what a professional can do. The question is however whether professionals are prepared to take responsibility for what they do, perform it with passion and find creative ways of dealing with difficult situations. From this, the future of a profession will be forged.

In order for our profession to be professionalised we need to have a well-defined body of scholarly knowledge, completion of some standardised and prescribed course of study, examination and certification by an oversight body which has disciplinary powers of practitioner’s behaviour. Accreditation of qualifications represent  an important aspect in professionalising the industry.

There are a number of barriers which all formed part of issues relating to the industry itself. These barriers included unqualified and inexperienced practitioners, lack of focus of what our work entails, lack of guidelines, a respected governing body, low entry levels to work in the profession, lack of interest in the professional body, lack of understanding from organisations of the value of we do , too many junior practitioners, and a vast number of qualifications not standardised.
 

With the advent of digital, practitioners thought that the online space would allow them to build pan-European coalitions with ease and speed, and on the cheap. These coalitions of people interested in very specific issues (web-speak: micro-communities),  often scattered and unaware of each other would finally have a single place in which to unify and mobilise their activity, which when fed into the policy loop would help drive political developments far more effectively. Regretfully, this has not yet happened. People across the EU may have been active on issues online, but on different platforms (and communicating in different languages) i.e. like-minded people may have been producing lots of good material and doing stuff which policy-makers and influencers would have taken note of, but their activity have remained as splintered as before. When setting up an online community to join the dots, it is hard to get people to join: raising awareness of a one-stop online community is difficult, and even if likeminded people are informed, getting them to join (and stay active) in a dedicated community is (and remains) nearly impossible.