No matter what level of employment a worker labors at—whether the most menial of occupations or a position requiring the highest level of education, experience, and skills—there are almost certainly one or more professional organizations they are qualified to be a member of.
The origins of such organizations are lost in the mists of time, but certainly they owe much to the medieval guilds of stone masons, carpenters, and other artisans that were widespread in the Middle Ages. These early forms of professional organizations were created to safeguard the secrets of their disciplines from the uninitiated, thus helping to provide job security, protect the authority of the guild’s leaders, provide a resource for members facing hard times, and ensure that the quality of the work they produced met the highest standards.