Book excerpt: Preparing professionals to meet the demands of changes in practice is a compelling issue for the development of society, professions and individual professionals. A key tenet of this book is that we currently prepare professionals for the world of work in ways that are generally limited in scope and inadequate for addressing contemporary professional practice. The book critically investigates professional education programmes and the assumptions upon which they are based. It argues for an ontological turn in which professional education attends not only to what students know and can do, but also who they are becoming as professionals. In a scholarly, well-grounded account, the book closely interweaves theory and empirical material on learning to be professionals. It provides a fresh, innovative approach to designing professional education programmes, as well as to research about this important enterprise. This book makes a timely, insightful contribution to debate about educating for the professions.