The recent rapid growth of professional and allied pursuits has heavily favored the salaried sector of this occupation category. Partly as a consequence of differential growth, salaried professionals are younger than the much less numerous self-employed. They also have a distinctive pattern of recruitment, involving higher proportions of manual origins and manual first jobs than are observed among the self-employed, for whom occupational inheritance is a conspicuous pattern. Self-employed professional workers, moreover, include disproportionate numbers of men whose fathers were self-employed proprietors. Lower white-collar first jobs are an important route to salaried professional positions.