← all questions · Part-time and parenting
Yes, in every major college, but the floor differs: RACP will approve down to 0.2 FTE 1, while RACS, ACEM, ANZCA and RANZCP all set a minimum of 0.5 FTE 2345. The college approves the training; your employer has to approve the roster. That second approval is the one that fails.
The college rules, briefly. RACP defines part-time as anything under 1.0 FTE and will consider down to 0.2 FTE, with work-based assessments pro-rated to your fraction — train at 6 months FTE across a year and you do half that year's assessments; supervisor reports are not pro-rated 1. RACS calls it flexible training: minimum 50% FTE, available only after 12 months of satisfactory training, approved one training year at a time, with a pro rata fee — and the whole program still has to finish inside nine years 2. ACEM will not certify a placement below 0.5 FTE, and maintenance time has the same floor 3. ANZCA requires at least 0.5 FTE with a contribution to both elective and acute work 4. RANZCP recommends at least 0.5 FTE, accredits 0.5 to 0.9, allows less only in exceptional circumstances approved by the Committee for Training, and requires a minimum of three pro-rata hours of supervision a week 5.
Two approvals, not one. The college approves the training plan. The employer decides whether it can actually roster you. RACP says so explicitly 1, and it is where most applications die.
What it costs you. Time, obviously — the training clock stretches in proportion. Pay drops with the fraction. Some colleges charge pro rata fees; RACS does 2. Nobody should tell you it is free.
What the sub adds that the policies don't. Departments are often hostile even where the policy is permissive, and it comes down to individual consultants and co-registrars. And the reason you give matters: "work-life balance" alone is reported as a weak application. Against that, people who did whole advanced training part time say it did not damage their careers 6. Both accounts are below.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
Hospitals while required to consider part-time still seem hostile. This goes down to specific departments and individual consultants and even colleague registrars.
I did all of advance training part time and felt that much more comfortable when I became a consultant because I'd been around the traps forever. Did not negatively impact my career at all, colleagues liked the familiarity.
It's very easy to work part time once you gain specialist qualification.
Doing part time training to get work life balance is not a great reason to be approved.
Less pay, takes twice as long. Had friends do the same thing with new bubs. Didn't seem to affect their careers negatively.
Asked 58 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /part.?time|\bLTFT\b|less than full.?time|job.?shar|0\.5 FTE|fractional/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the part-time and job-share training threads (med-school part-time threads, which the regex also catches, were excluded), balanced so the two accounts of departmental hostility sit beside the two first-hand accounts of it working out.