Getting nowhere fast

My demotivational reading for today was this from Brigid Andersen (ABC News):

Scientists predict agricultural brain drain

Not so much the story itself, but the stories from other people who commented on it. For example, "Disgruntled" of WA says:

I'm an agricultural professional with a lot of agronomy experience, I have a PhD, some international experience, I'm not retiring age and I'm out of work in WA.

The constant three-year time frames of work, and gaps in employment get you down after a while. You can constantly scrabble for funds but that doesnt have much guarantee of success and occupies a lot of mental energy; energy I naively thought was going to be used to come up with innovative ideas and experimental designs. It has certainly driven depression in my case.

Unfortunately, universities contribute to the problem as all they seem to see is getting students through and into a job (any quasi-professional job) and then it's not their problem anymore. All I ever hear from them is good demand for graduates, but precious little follow-up on what the graduates are doing. I know from the year I graduated from that most are not professionals in the field now. As for an agricultural science as a PhD, I think youd have to be institutionalised for thinking it was going to be secure I can think of two examples right now of one PhD driving a taxi having given up, and another having to fill in by counting money for a security firm for at least 12 months between jobs not a great investment by Australia there. This is in WA, which off the top of my head grows 40% of our largest export crop and the state government has just been pushing to get rid of 100 jobs in the Dept of Agriculture and so no renewal of contract staff (and hence my complaints, I might add).

And then further down the page you can read Gav's comment:

So, you need 20-odd years of schooling to get the job, the pay is poor, and you're guaranteed to lose the job (or at least have to reapply for it) after 3 years regardless of how good you are...and people don't want to do this work?

On the other side, you spend three years training a high-level graduate, expensively, for unique skills, and then you just lose the employee?

Is there any simpler way to illustrate what's wrong?

Lack of job security, poor pay, constant scrabbling for funding... it all sounds familiar. It was the reason I didn't choose to study or take a career in science. Instead I studied history and philosophy of science (a humanities discipline) and while I was at uni anyway, took a second degree in fine arts majoring in jewellery. For the very same reasons I chose not to follow a career in science, I initially chose not to pursue a living out of jewellery either.

I have to say that my search for funding for my agriculture research project, managed pollination, is not going very well. There is interest but no money. My academic background disadvantages me in the funding game because I do not have honors or a research track record. Why is it that organisations complain so loudly about difficulty of finding people. Do they not hear us complaining how hard it is to get a foot in the door?

The brain drain is not the problem. The organisational culture that creates it is.