Times are hard in Russia, and even, or especially, the most talented and highly educated people are having a rough time of it. Leaving one’s chosen area of specialization to find work elsewhere has become an epidemic.

Igor Andreyev recently changed his occupation.

A former philosophy professor at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Andreyev turned in his note of resignation last summer and is now setting up a small business consultancy firm.

An American firm has assured him that it will invest thousands of dollars to get his project started.

Andreyev has good reasons for his decision: dwindling state support for research and academics and the decreasing value of the ruble, which has made his take-home pay almost worthless.

With nearly 30 years of teaching and research behind him, he said the rapid economic changes that have taken place call for a change in the roles people take in society.

Andreyev, now 58, has no business education or training, but sees nothing wrong in moving away from philosophy.

"It's no longer interesting and I am not even making money," he said. "It's better to get involved in more profitable employment."

Andreyev is not alone.

In 1997, Natalya Semyonova abandoned her secretarial work in a Russian firm.

According to Semyonova, her reasons were the meager pay she received as well as the nature of the job itself.

"It's very stressful working as a secretary," she said. "It can have negative effects on your health."

Semyonova, an applied linguistics graduate of Moscow's Institute of Foreign Languages, has changed her occupation several times, working as a teacher, a hotel worker and a secretary. Presently, she owns her own food store business in Moscow, managing a staff of six.

She said the prestige of intellectual work in Russia is declining and has witnessed many of her highly qualified friends relinquish the professions they studied at school.

Irina Olegovna, a graduate from Novomoskovsk Polytechnical Institute, said working within your specialty is always best, provided it's rewarding. She argues that the factors underlying choice of work are the vagaries of the labor market and, most importantly, the very low pay associated with many traditional jobs in Russia.

"In the small town where I worked as a schoolteacher, I could barely support our family with my take-home pay," Irina said. As a teacher, Irina's salary stood at 600 rubles [$22] a month.

"Everyday, we have to figure out how to feed our family," she said, now a trader who is the only person in her family with a job and has to take of her sick mother and 5-year-old son.

She pointed to one young man with a swollen face in half-intact winter shoes and a filthy overcoat sitting by a dilapidated building near the train station and asked: "Have you seen life in this city? It's difficult if you don't have a well-paying job these days. Nothing motivates me to continue teaching."

This changing of occupations is not totally negative for the economy.

"There are thousands of competent specialists out there, talented people who can be put to proper use in the economic sphere," rector of the Higher School of Economics, Yaroslav Kuzminov, said. "People can change jobs often and still contribute."

Nonetheless, he characterized the process as a domestic brain drain. He said it is caused by low state pay, a lack of interest in current employment and a discrepancy between the conditions in which people live and those that they would like.

Most employment and labor recruitment centers in Moscow estimate that at least 45 percent of their clients with higher education in science or engineering are looking for business-related jobs.

"We get many resumes from [such] people looking for business-related employment," said Katya Zubritskaya, manager at Commonwealth Resources, an executive search and support personnel recruitment agency. "It's an indication that these people are quitting their jobs and looking for work."

Zubritskaya admitted that work outside one's profession is not really as ideal as the alternative.

Asked if she had noticed any trends in types of persons who change jobs, Anna Kozlova, a project manager at EMDS Consulting, an executive human resources consulting firm, identified specialists paid by the state, such as teachers, doctors, engineers and physical scientists.

"Lack of appropriate professional orientation makes it difficult for these people to secure employment," she said. "The Russian higher educational system produces relatively low adaptability to the requirements of the labor market."

She said universities turn out many graduates whose skills are not really needed in the labor market.

Over the past ten years, Russian state-sponsored science alone has lost more than 400,000 specialists to business, according to Vladimir Fillippov, the minister of education.

This flight of scientifically trained people is damaging the higher educational system.

"There is a considerable lack of young and middle-aged teachers," said Kuzminov.

According to him, one of the most important problems of Russia's educational system is that "most teachers see themselves as a group of economic outsiders," because their high level of education is no longer a guarantee against poverty and, indeed, very many are poor.

As a solution, he suggested the state increase its annual budgetary allocation for science.

"Those who would be part of the Western middle class have the lowest salaries in Russia," Art Franczek, dean of the American Institute of Business and Economics, said. "It's important for people to adapt to the business world and earn a living."

Something similar happened in the United States after the Cold War, when defense spending was cut and people trained for military work moved into business activities, he said.

"The trend is becoming common due to the liberalized market economy," Franczek said, "in which labor relocates on the basis of remuneration and other working conditions."

He said that there are still possibilities for people in their mid-thirties or early forties to earn, for instance, MBA’s and obtain more profitable employment, although sometimes age can be a limitation, as firms often prefer younger specialists.