This paper presents empirical findings from the data-base established within the PROFKNOW-project and is chiefly focused on the national cases of Finland, Ireland, Spain and Sweden where survey-data is available, but an overview of secondary data related to England, Greece and Portugal is also presented. Another comparative angle in the article concerns the relationship between the fields of teaching and nursing.In line with the overall design of the PROFKNOW-project a "bottom-up" perspective is applied where actual conceptions, actions, resources and strategies in the everyday working-life are presented, but this in context of general restructuring processes. In order to capture this multi-level complexity we apply crucial structuring concepts in our presentation of the empirical findings. Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of social field, habitus and symbolic capital are applied on parts of our empirical material in order to analyze ongoing processes within the field of teaching. Those empirical findings will be contrasted with collected data concerning nurses' everyday-working life and also related to the ideal-typical conception of professional development, involving e.g. professional trajectories and mobility aspects. Jürgen Habermas' conceptualization in terms of life- and system-world is applied on parts of our empirical material in order to characterize qualitative aspects of restructuring and specifically boundary tensions and conflicts relevant for teaching and nursing.