Jim had just done his usual survey of job advertisements in the last weekend's editions of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian. Ms Glenda Gray, a partner at Seegray Consulting in Canberra, said that typically 80 per cent of these types of job vacancies were not advertised as they were filled by direct placements through personal contacts and networking. Another recruitment consultant said this percentage was up from 40 per cent five years ago. The employment industry generally believes employers advertise only when they are desperate.
Salaries are substantial, up to 'attractive six figure packages'.
It discourages many of our brightest students from studying for a whole collection of job opportunities that are expanding faster than jobs in the non-science sector. If the past 100 years made up the century of science, the next 100 years are already shaping up as the century of super-science. Everywhere you look, science is setting the pace wherever progress is being made. The two biggest drivers are the human genome project and all the recent advances in the 'hard' sciences, particularly maths and physics. People who are not in touch with recent developments in the sciences unfortunately do not realise that today's scientific advances are generating a multiplier effect.