The Quest for (Higher) Professional Status: Second Thoughts

The sociopolitical movement to enhance youth workers' occupational status and related emoluments strategically links this goal to competency-based assessment. While the goals of improved conditions, remuneration, and career opportunities for workers is supported, the joining of those goals to both professionalization and in turn competency-based worker assessments is not. Brief analyses of the logic and practice of competency-based assessments, of the medieval guilds as a historical source of these and of worker and market control, of youth work as a social agency-based semi-profession, the current status of profession as a symbol of social status and authority, and a quick overview of Aristotle's phronesis and its relevance to youth work practice provide sources for the author's second thoughts about the ideational frame and argument for this sociopolitical and sociolegal movement.