← all questions · Competitiveness
Intensive care, psychiatry outside the flagship metro services, and most pathology disciplines outside metro QLD, NSW and VIC. CICM has no entry interview or national ranking 1; psychiatry intake is falling and posts go unfilled 2. The catch in every case is that the hard part has been moved somewhere else.
Intensive care is the clearest case. CICM entry is six yes-or-no eligibility questions — accredited ICU time plus referees — with no interview and no national ranking 1. What is hard is finishing: roughly half fail each exam sitting, the minimum is six years FTE and most take longer 1, and the consultant market is tight. Easy in, hard out.
Psychiatry, outside a handful of metro services. RANZCP intake fell 455 to 429 and NSW dropped 25% to 94 2; WA, the only jurisdiction publishing a ratio, runs about 2:1 3. Research scores zero in the national rubric 4. The competition is for named hospitals, not for the specialty.
Pathology, outside the hot markets. RCPA selection is employer-led with no college scoring and no national round, and NSW alone has around 90 anatomical pathology training positions with 10–30 vacancies a year 5. Chemical pathology has three training positions nationally and up to two vacancies a year 5 — tiny, but not contested.
The one the sub nominates that the data no longer supports is general surgery. It was the soft landing; RACS cut the intake from 121 in 2024 to 54 in 2025 and the 2026 round ran 195 applications to 50 offers, 25.6% 6. Do not treat it as the surgical safety net any more.
The pattern. A specialty is undersubscribed for a reason, and the reason is usually the work: night stroke calls, patients who do not get better, litigation risk, or an exam that fails half the room 78. "Less competitive" almost always means the cost was moved from selection to training, to the job market, or to your Tuesday.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
you'd have to wake up every night for stroke calls during training.
General surgery No young doctors want to do it. Bad lifestyle and relatively poor remuneration compared to other surgical specialties
made competitive by people wanting to get into Anaesthesia training. Take out the rotational folks coming from ED and IM you really have a few trainees
The daily work in psych can be a hard sell to many. In public, most of your patients hate your guts. In private, most of your patients have impossible expectations.
Asked 12 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 /less competitive|under.?rated|undersubscribed|easiest specialt|easier than (it|they) look/i. Quotes are the top-scoring nominations in the undersubscribed threads, each paired in the answer with the reason the specialty is undersubscribed rather than presented as a free lunch.