In the classical sociology of professions literature, professionalism is said to exist when a group of workers achieves a monopoly over a given set of tasks and determines the manner in which the latter should best be carried out. Within this task-based approach, the employment status of professionals is something that is rarely addressed. In this chapter, we argue that an employment-based perspective might be a potentially fruitful way of analysing professionalism. It offers the opportunity to move beyond the study of occupational “boundary work”, and to focus on different forms of occupational segregation and segmentation. Based on the analysis of the recent changes within the Swiss higher education sector, we show how studying the employment conditions of academics in the early stages of their careers provides an original window into the differentiation processes that occur within professions. We argue that precarious employment conditions are associated with lower levels of identification with a task-based model of professional identity.