This study aims at investigating how a group of state school teachers in Iran perceived professionalism in their career. The study draws on the two senses of the concept of professionalism: independent or transformative professionalism (bottom-up) versus managerial or prescribed professionalism (top-down). For this purpose, a checklist was developed based on these different senses to probe 85 language teachers' perceptions of the different aspects of professionalism based on several interviews with teachers selected purposefully for this study. The results showed the majority of the participants regarded professionalism as a top-down process depending on the extent to which society, culture, ministry of education and even school administration define, support and provide for being professional in their career. Moreover, the comparison of the results of the two groups of the participants, i.e. those who were teaching at both state and private schools and those who just taught at state school (chi-square) showed a significant difference between the two groups in the sense that just-state school teachers considered themselves as much more limited in gaining the second sense of professionalism due to their teaching experiences in the past which had considerably influenced their future goals, developments and directions.