What is wrong with the position that any given broadly defined occupation is either a profession or is not?
That approach leads to such conclusions as only doctors and not nurses are members of the medical profession and only officers and not enlisted are professionals in the POA. The vast majority of occupations and professions are distributed all along the great middle between the two extremes. The characteristics which determine an occupation’s place on the Profession Continuum is not prestige or salary, but rather the three criteria. A century or two ago only a few recognized professions existed (physician, professor, clergy, etc.) and now there’s no need for the vacuum tube changer in today’s computer systems (an important job only half a generation ago.)(001)