Your questions seem to be largely rhetorical, would you like to answer them for us? Nobody is suggesting you wouldn't be able to work in IT without membership of a professional body, just like nobody is suggesting you can't work in IT without a relevant degree - these things are indicators that some employers might like to use to pre-judge people's ability in, aptitude for and attitude to their chosen profession, but they're not the only way to prove yourself - as you say, you can learn on the job and work your way up. (Although those with formal software engineering training and experience of taking over projects from those without it may be sceptical of how well this approach scales, on average.) It'd be nice to see more professionalism in IT, particularly in large-scale development and deployment (I'm looking at you, government IT projects), but I don't personally see the BCS achieving that at present. I think Jeremy's point is that it's hard for them to do so until employers start actually caring about professionalism in IT.