During the last 30-40 years education in the professions has increasingly been formalised and institutionalised. Professional education in the "semi professions" has moved from a "vocational" model to an "academic" model. Nevertheless, development of professional knowledge is a continuous process: important elements are learned during college education, while other elements may first be really developed during occupational practise and continuing professional education. It is argued that what is most important in college education is to connect student to professional knowledge and that the challenge is to develop their "wanting structure" to use a concept developed by Karin Knorr Cetina. Further development of professional knowledge may, however, first of all be a matter of contextual factors like professional tasks, organisational arrangements and opportunities not individual motivation. The aim of this paper is to examine the extent and how training of beginning professionals are organised in selected professional fields, the relationship between what is learned in professional education and during the early occupational carrier, and the relationship between individual knowledge strategies developed during college education and further development of professional knowledge. Important questions are: " To what extent are professionals systematically trained during their early professional carriers and in what types of training do beginning professionals take part? " To what extent is college education assessed relevant for professional practice and what types of knowledge and competence has to be developed further? " What is the relationship between knowledge obtained during education and knowledge learned in occupational practise and training? " To what extent is an active and critical knowledge strategy during college education related to the extent and how beginning professionals' further development of their professional knowledge. An important issue in all these questions is whether there are differences between three professional groups: nurses, teachers and engineers. The educational programmes in these fields differ in their classification of knowledge, curriculum structure as well as academic and practise- oriented traditions. Moreover, the characteristic of work in these professional fields are significantly different in terms of individual autonomy, extent of team work and individual responsibility. In this way the paper also addresses the complex issues of transfer and re- contextualisation. The data are drawn from a longitudinal national questionnaire study among students in their last year in college and 3 year after graduation (StudData). Preliminary results indicate that there are significant differences between professional fields in how and the extent to which beginning professionals are given systematic training when in their early occupational carrier. An important question which will be discussed in the paper is why there are such differences