Every employer says they want it and almost nobody teaches it directly. That gap is a market, and it’s the one this word sits on top of. Professionalism covers soft skills training, workplace conduct, ethics programmes and a corporate learning industry that spends enormous sums trying to instil something it struggles to define. Professional associations have the strongest claim of all, since defining and enforcing professionalism is literally their function.

Job titles are an underrated category of domain. They’re searched by people looking for work, by employers writing descriptions, by students choosing a path, and by anyone trying to hire, which is four distinct audiences arriving at the same phrase. Market research analyst supports several business models on the back of that. A job board specialising in research roles, a career and salary resource, a training and certification provider, a recruitment firm, or a professional community.

One word covering serious technical fields and loaded commercial ones, which means a buyer pool considerably wider than a narrower name would attract. In chemistry and catalysis, selectivity is a core performance measure: how much of the desired product a reaction yields versus the alternatives. In pharmacology it describes how specifically a drug binds its target. Both are technical uses with research and industrial audiences. Commercially it means choosiness. University selectivity, hiring selectivity, membership selectivity.