In its long history, teaching was generally considered a vocation, but in today's literature, it is defined as a profession. The analysis of the literature determines certain structural characteristics that a particular occupation must have in order to be classified as a profession, and they are: specialized knowledge base, a longer period of higher education, developed reputation and social status, developed professional ethics, possessing professional autonomy (Cobbold, 2015; Monterio, 2015; Šporer, 1990; Turner and Hodge, 1970). An occupation can be professionalized to a certain point which depends on how many structural characteristics of the profession it possesses. This is called the continuum of professionalization from which it can be concluded that occupation is the base of profession. History considered medicine and law as the first real profession from which the main characteristics of the profession that today's occupations strive for were derived. A review of the available research showed that teachers are generally satisfied with their work (Borić, 2017; Markočić Dekanić et al., 2019; Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2015; Vidić and Miljković, 2019; Vidić, 2009) and that perceived organizational support is positively correlated to job satisfaction (Kurtessis et al., 2015; Rhoades and Eisenberger, 2002; Tariq Maan et al., 2020). This doctoral thesis tried to determine the contribution of teachers' assessment of the characteristics of the teaching profession and teachers as professionals and perceived organizational support in explaining job satisfaction. It was conducted with mixed-method research, and the sample consisted of primary school teachers working in grades 1-4. The qualitative part of the research was conducted with a focus group (N = 10), and the quantitative part was conducted with an online questionnaire (N = 400). The main results of a focus group show that teachers recognize specialized knowledge and methodical skills as the main identificational marks of the teaching profession. As main deficits, they recognize a lack of support from supervisors, a negative image of the teaching profession in public and insufficient salary considering work complexity. Results also show that teachers identify regulation of professional conduct with the personal belief of what is moral and right. Only a few are familiar with the ethical code of school as something that regulates the professional conduct of teachers on a school level. An interesting result is the fact that teachers consider teaching as an occupation mainly because of the negative image of teaching in public and the fact that a part of the teacherpopulation is uninterested in their own job. The main results of the data analysis of the questionnaire show that the examined sociodemographic characteristics do not affect the higherassessment of teaching as a profession and teachers as professionals, higher job satisfaction, or greater perceived organizational support. Also, the results show that teachers who perceive greater support from their school are more satisfied with all aspects of their work.