Highly-skilled worker

An employee who possesses a thorough and comprehensive knowledge of the job processes, acquired through intensive technical or professional training, and who has the ability to exercise independent judgment.

"According to the OECD, highly skilled workers are defined as having a university degree or extensive experience in one field. It includes highly skilled specialists, independent executives and senior managers, specialized technicians or tradespersons, investors, businesspersons, etc."
(Institute for the Study of International Migration, Do Brains really going down the Drain?, visited 2011-02-28).

"The term ‘skilled workers', which is used often interchangeably with ‘professional' and ‘highly skilled' workers does not have the same meaning in different contexts. […]

The most obvious starting place is to define highly skilled either by level of education (Borjas 2003) or occupation (Bouvier and Simcox 1994; Cornelius, Thomas J. Espenshade and Salehyan 2001). Some observers favor one definition over the other and which definition is applied often depends on what one is trying to accomplish and what data are available for the analysis."
(Lowell, L., and Batalova., J., International migration of highly skilled workers: methodological and public policy issues, Princeton University, 2005, visited 2011-02-28),