In North America, or at least here in Western Canada, "Professional" is restricted to those occupations which have a legally recognised and enforced Professional Association. To refer to a “professional” here can mean one of two things, depending on context. The first is simply “that you are paid for you efforts in a given field.” From a legal and business perspective however, “professional” is reserved for those individuals who are employed in fields where others are barred from entry unless accepted by the relevant professional association.
Doctors, Lawyers and Engineers immediately come to mind, but there are most definitely other professions that enjoy legal protection.
To contrast, there are two other classes of occupation: technician and trade. Technicians go to school and learn their craft there. These are individuals who typically obtain a two-year diploma or undergraduate degree in their field, but who do not enjoy legal protection of their Professional Association. Dental Hygienists for example, X-Raw or Environmental Technicians, or certain programmers.
Tradespeople on the other hand generally learn their craft either from an apprenticeship, a one year certification at a post-secondary institution or industry certifications. This is where you find the plumbers, masons, and the vast majority of individuals working in IT.
The difference has nothing to do with “class” but entirely to do with education. TO break it down really simply for you:
Professionals have the longest required education. Apart for the training in their field, they are required to take many courses on professional ethics, and are held to a high ethical standard. Misconduct will see them barred from their profession for life. To be allowed to operate at all and use the titles as defined by those professional associations they must meet the minimum standards of that organisation in terms of knowledge of their field, experience and history of conduct.
Technicians have received quite a bit of formal training. They generally belong to a voluntary “technical society” that tries to ensure minimum competency standards. They don’t generally receive ethical training, but are required to take language and social training.
Tradespeople are skilled workers of their craft. (They are most emphatically /not/ unskilled labour!) Tradespoeple are not required to take language, social or ethical training. Instead they focus entirely on learning the particular trade which they have chosen as their occupation. Many trades also have voluntary trade guilds (in some jurisdictions, these are becoming less than voluntary) which attempt to ensure minimum levels of competency.
You might disagree with the breakdown of these terms, but it is absolutely standard where I come from. And by these definitions, most workers in IT are simply not professionals. They aren’t even technicians. They are tradespeople. One of the key notes about trades people is that they receive no formal management training. All professionals are required to take some as part of their profession, and even Technicians are exposed to a minimal amount of it. Tradespeople have no such requirement.
There are certifications a tradesperson can seek that prove they have taken this training separately. Getting your PMP (project management professional) designation is one way, but most tradespeople prefer to eschew formal training of any kind and rely entirely on the strength of their reputation.
The importance behind the categorisation is not that it tells you immediately about how valuable a given person is, but it indicates a general baseline minimum competency for any random sampling of individuals in that category. I can trust that any member of a legally protected professional association has received ethics training, as well as social training, languages and exposure to management training. I can trust any technician to be familiar with the absolute basics of management principals, while having a minimum of language and social training. I can trust a tradesperson to get a given job done.
The issue at hand here is that most IT folk are tradespeople, not professionals. They have zero management training and zero ethics training. They are problem solvers, not business thinkers. Of course there are exceptions to this, but they truly are exceptions. Most IT workers aren’t ready for management. They are perfectly fine workers if they are properly managed, and most often they are even perfectly okay to do a task without oversight of any kind. They aren’t however generally trained to fully understand where IT and the business interact, integrate and where they really and truly are in their own worlds. Experience can give that some IT workers, but not to all.
I can pick any random Engineer and put him in charge of a project. If he feels incapable of handling it, he is bound by his professional ethics to say so. Not saying so will have severe penalties for his career.
I cannot say the same of a random IT worker. There is nothing beyond a personal sense of responsibility to compel an IT worker to tell me if they are overwhelmed or unable to take on the responsibilities of management. Nor am I even assured they have been trained to be capable of managing a project.
IT is business; it’s fully integrated and part of any given business. Those who work in IT however haven’t caught up, and neither have our educational requirements, industry standards or reputation.
As a group, IT workers have earned their reputation as antisocial nerds. There are certainly those among us who aren’t, and who work very hard to surpass hold ourselves to the highest possible standards. Those individuals are still considered rare amongst our trade, rare enough that it’s not something that can yet hope to be called a profession.