Mobility Among Regulated Professions Facing Various Institutions Towards Entry to Professional Practice: From an Empirical to a Literature-Based Analysis.

The process of admission of foreign-trained professionals (FTPs) by a profession’s regulating body reveals much of the profession’s identity and its role in society. It is also an expression of various institutions’ ability to respond to this challenge. Indeed, regulated professions are more and more pushed to open their admission procedures and articulate its process with immigration and complementary training institutions in order to offer a more efficient, transparent and fair entry into professional practice for FTPs in various countries. This presentation will first show how case studies on French professionals in Quebec brought our attention to these processes’ characteristics. This is at first surprising since French immigrants in the selected professions benefit from mutual recognition arrangements (MRAs) between France in Quebec since 2010. Following this empirically-based analysis among 7 regulated professions in Quebec, a literature review on disjuncture or lack of coordination among institutions in these processes leads to questioning regulating bodies’ rules of admission, in the context of transformation of professions through globalization and rising flux of migrating professionals worldwide. When some countries succeed in allowing given categories of FTPs to practices, how can others who don’t allow similar categories of FTPs, not give the impression of protecting themselves? Such questions are bound to be raised within today’s paradigms of mobility (Pellerin, 2011) or hyper-mobility (Hawthorne, 2013). Literature analysis shows that admission of FTPs in regulated professions is a complex issue and “how institutions think” (Douglas, 1986) can contribute to further inertia through disjuncture or coordination problems between institutions.