> Any PhD student should be well aware of the career difficulty that follows There's an important disconnect about the job market. Most PhD students know ge

> Any PhD student should be well aware of the career difficulty that follows There's an important disconnect about the job market. Most PhD students know general facts about the job market: one in ten PhD holders becomes a professor. Very few people have a good idea about that applies, specifically, to their own career prospects. As for postdocs, treating it as "a holding pattern" is, IMHO, the root of the problem. There's been a massive push, especially from the NIH, to speed up the "pathway to independence", but that's only really a goal because postdocs' job conditions aren't great (low salary, massive job insecurity). Research is hard and it's absolutely bizarre that we want to transition people away from doing it as soon as they are trained, and towards supervising it, a role for which they get virtually no training or mentoring. If I were King of Science, I'd move towards a model with a more gradual career path and less trainee mania.