Practitioners and scholars of academic advising have long grappled with the professional status of the field. To better understand the characteristics of professionalization and the obstacles that stand in the way of professionalizing the field, a structured review of the literature from 1980 to 2016 was conducted. Three characteristics of professionalization were discussed in the advising literature: issues with scholarship, expansion of graduate programs, and community. Obstacles to professionalization discovered through the review were the need to define the field further, role of the professional association, training and education required to perform the advising role, personal and occupational autonomy, and lack of a consistent administrative home for advising. Suggestions for future research are offered.

Through the professionalization process, an occupation transforms into a profession. Although much scholarship has situated academic advising as a professional endeavor, in the past few years, the authors of two papers posited that advising is not a profession, a contention not shared by all within the advising community. Despite much scholarly deliberation, advising and the role of it in higher education remains misunderstood by administrators, faculty members, staff, students, and some advisors themselves. Therefore, discussions of professionalizing the field remain both inevitable and imperative. To advance the dialogue, a phenomenography was used to explore the variety of perspectives that NACADA leaders shared about the professionalization of academic advising. Five attitudinal categories emerged: assumptive, presumptive, emerging profession, inferiority complex, and the need for further definition.

Advising/personal tutoring has moved from the fringes of higher education to the center of student success initiatives. Advising professionals serve as faculty members, mentors, student advocates, and campus leaders. Drawing upon data from an empirical investigation regarding the professionalization of academic advising, we examine the critical aspects related to performing effective academic advising and personal tutoring. Using directed qualitative content analysis, data were examined for evidence of professional values, professional skills, professional behaviors, training, and continuing professional education and development. We consider the findings in comparison to NACADA's Core Values, the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education in support of student success by promoting excellence in academic advising (EAA), NACADA's Core Competencies of Academic Advising, Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) Standards, UKAT Professional Framework for Advising and Tutoring, and United Kingdom's National Occupational Standards.

As higher education leaders, chief academic officers are capable of affecting the ways advising is structured and performed on college campuses, but little is known about how they regard advising. This study investigated the perceptions of 181 chief academic officers at two- and four-year public and private institutions in the U.S. regarding advising tasks. Using a Likert-scale instrument built using the NACADA core competencies, we explored how chief academic officers' perceptions of advisor tasks represent the informational, relational, and conceptual areas of the core competencies. Results revealed small significant differences between institutional type in perceptions of advising roles and functions. This study lays the foundation for future inquiry into perceptions of chief academic officers and other key stakeholders of advising.

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