intro

After a tumultuous month at my workplace and being caught in a downsizing frenzy I finally had a sort of wake-up call to really start the one thing that many people are already doing on the web : Blogging. This may be a very familiar situation for many many people worldwide particularly in the wake of the recent global financial and economic crisis. Like most of you out there I have just joined the blogging cum income generation bandwagon which is getting more crowded by the day and hopefully start writing quality content that could generate income possibly to the point that I do not lay much emphasis on my "professional career growth" which means a heck of a lot of money.



So what am I going to talk about in this entry....hmmm!!! Well I belong to the white-collar class and am supposed to be in a profession of high regard (the problem is most people have never even heard of it before to have some opinion of it). In fact my professional body's monthly magazine proclaims that the knowledge, skills and judgement that members of my profession have acquired through professional education and their work is highly applicable in the area of managing risk. There has even been talk of highly experienced members of my profession being sought after by investment banks and other large financial institutions who were morally responsible for the credit crisis.



So what profession do I belong to.....most people have never even heard of it before and many people in financial institutions don't have a clue what we actually do (Sadly in the past the name of the profession was associated with a major financial disaster that occured in the UK in the late nineties). So what profession do I belong to.....I did a little referencing on the etymology of the word and I was extremely disappointed because it thoroughly misrepresents what we do. The oldest trace of the word was in 1553 and its Latin transliteration meant 'registrar, clerk, copyist, account keeper and was in 1849 formally adopted by the industry in which members of my profession mainly work in.



So has anyone guessed yet what profession I belong to? I'll leave it to you to figure it out but after finding out the ancient meaning of the word I have mixed feelings about the appropriateness of the name. It is understandable that nearly 80% of the technical knowledge that members of my profession need to know today did not even exist in 1849 when the name was formally adopted. The fact that no one has ever thought of modernizing the name and possibly coming up with contemporary technically-savvy designations (kind of like in the IT world or even the medical professions myriad of Latin tongue twisting specializations) is somewhat disappointing but will eventually happen as the rapidly changing information technology and knowledge landscape will force it to do so.

As I wind up this intro I have just begun to realize that the content that I will be putting on would be stuff that's specific to the profession that I work in but in a simplified non technical way and also analysis of other phenomena that relate to the rapidly changing ecology of finance and economics in the same way information technology is accelerating our material evolution.