Professional Ethics, Compliance, and Governance
What to Know
Understand ethical frameworks in practice: duty-based (rules and obligations), consequence-based (outcomes), and virtue-based (character). Know professional codes of conduct themes - integrity, objectivity, confidentiality, competence, due care, and avoiding conflicts of interest. Compliance topics include privacy principles (lawful basis, purpose limitation, data minimization, individual rights, breach notification), records retention, intellectual property (copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret), licensing, and acceptable use. Governance covers policies versus standards versus procedures versus guidelines, policy lifecycle (draft, approve, publish, review), control frameworks, audit and monitoring, third-party risk, and whistleblowing channels. Know that governance sets direction and oversight while management executes.
Traps
Questions often conflate legal and ethical: something may be legal yet unethical, and exam answers should favor the higher standard. Another trap treats a policy as optional guidance - policies are mandatory; guidelines are discretionary. Watch for conflicts of interest presented as harmless familiarity, and for disclosure of confidential data framed as helpfulness. Be careful with IP: copyright protects expression, patents protect inventions, trademarks protect source identifiers, trade secrets require reasonable secrecy measures.
Worked Example
An analyst is asked to include a client's unpublicized financial data in a marketing demo. Rule of thumb: apply the strictest applicable constraint - confidentiality obligations, privacy law, and professional code. The answer is to decline, escalate to the data owner, and propose anonymized or synthetic data. Legality alone is insufficient; consent, purpose limitation, and duty of confidentiality all apply.
Exam Tip
When two answers both seem right, choose the one that escalates through proper channels and documents the decision.