The Crisis of Confidence in Professional knowledge

I found this an interesting read as in my last job I helped train students to become Chartered Accountants, and part of my role was looking at the competencies and work experience required to qualify as a CA.
I thought the article was quite negative and seems to ignore the fact that over 99% of transactions dealt with by "professionals" are successful. Of course there has to be a question over who is being referred to as a "professional" here. Certainly the traditional professions invest a huge amount of time and energy qualifying, and I believe rightly deserve to be rewarded for that effort.
That having been said there are of course problems in every profession as the media is very quick to report, the current banking crisis being a case in point. I can only really speak from an accountants perspective but I see many of these problems arising from three related issues:

1. as the article points out technological change - this has brought about a demand from clients for solutions to problems NOW. In CA offices 70 hour weeks are common place amongst many staff trying to meet client deadlines. The fatigue and stress resulting from this can affect professional judgement.

2. information overload - again just looking at a CAs position, year on year, the syllabus required to qualify expands and expands. Much of this is as a consequence of fairly academic research bringing about new legislative requirements. Whether these actually add value to the end product produced is questionable. it has become more and more difficult to be a "generalist" dealing with accountancy, tax and audit over the past 15 years or so, the volume of technical material to keep up to date with being fairly monstrous.

3. and thirdly good old fashioned greed. I think this relates to the mangerial/professional conflict that Grant mentioned in the lecture. In accountancy firms partners are also extremely cost conscious leading to cuts in budgeted time to complete work. This has definitely led to corners being cut in some instances. In addition to this there is always the fear of losing a big client, along with all the fee income associated with it. Again this can impact on the professional's independence to make judgements, and disagree with the client when necessary.

In recognition of these points ethics has assumed a much more important part of the ICAS syllabus in recent years. There has always been a comprehensive ethics handbook, but students now receive ethics lectures where attendance is compulsory (the only part of the teaching where this is the case) and they must prepare a case study on ethics. This emphasis should hopefully help result in the next generation of accountants being more robust and aware of when their professional judgement is being compromised.

I'm not sure where all this leaves careers guidance. I think there is certainly a case to develop a much more in depth framework of ethical guidelines to follows. As we saw in Pete's PORG lessons there are definitely situations we could find ourselves in where its difficult to know what's the right course of action to take. The managerial/professional conflict definitely exists in practice too within careers guidance, and again its important to know when your professional judgement is being compromised.