Specialty selection interviews in Australia

How selection into Australian specialty training actually works: who runs it, whether there is an interview, and whether your state changes the answer.

Several bodies are named by their initials below. There is a plain-English list of all of them at the end of this page.

Is your interview national or state-based?

Both, and which one you get is decided by your specialty rather than by your postcode.

That is the part most candidates have backwards. People assume the process is set by the state they work in, the way a hospital job is. For roughly half of Australian specialty training it is set nationally by the college, and the state you live in changes nothing except the flight you book. For the other half, the college never sees your application at all. Your employer decides, and the process in Brisbane genuinely is not the process in Perth.

So the honest sentence is longer than the question:

College examinations are national. Interviews are national for some specialties, jurisdictional for others, a two-stage hybrid for a third group, and non-existent for the biggest entry cohort in the country.

That last clause is not a technicality. General practice takes more entrants than any other specialty in Australia, and since the 2025 intake it has had no interview whatsoever.

The one-line answer for your specialty

Every row below is the position for the 2027 intake, which means applications ran during 2026. Each row links to the document it is read from, so you can check it yourself; the colleges reissue these annually. For the specialties where an employer selects you, that link goes to the college’s own page confirming it does not run selection, which is the point of the row.

If your specialty sits in the right-hand “yes” group, most published interview advice written for Australian candidates is describing a process you are not going to sit.

Four ways Australian specialty selection is run

Underneath that table there are only four arrangements. Knowing which one you are in tells you who to ask, what to read, and what your preparation is actually for.

One: the college runs a single national process

One application, one set of scores, one ranked list, offers made centrally. Where you want to work is a preference you express, not a separate application you make.

This covers all nine surgical specialties under the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS), obstetrics and gynaecology under RANZCOG, dermatology under the ACD, and the first stage of ophthalmology under RANZCO.

The surgical version has a feature worth knowing early: for the 2027 intake, twelve of the thirteen surgical selection processes hold their interview on one date, in one place. Urology interviews in Sydney. Vascular surgery in Brisbane. Cardiothoracic surgery at the RACS office in Adelaide. The single exception is general surgery in Australia, whose interviews vary by region and which asks applicants to submit interview preferences before the round.

If you are applying to a specialty in this group, the useful reading is your specialty society’s selection regulations, because everything that matters is published there and differs between societies: how many panels, how long each one runs, and what share of your score the interview carries.

Timing follows the same pattern. Surgical interviews cluster between May and July of the year before you would start, and each specialty runs its own on a single date. The date and the city are published in that specialty’s selection regulations, and both move each year, so read them from the current document rather than from any guide.

→ The SET selection process

Two: the college sets the rules, the jurisdiction runs the selection

You register centrally with the college, then apply locally, sometimes to several networks separately. The college controls eligibility and the shape of the assessment; the state network makes the offer and employs you.

Clinical radiology is the clearest case. You obtain a College Registration Verification Number (CRVN) from RANZCR, then apply to a state network. Victoria is the exception, where RANZCR has run selection centrally since 2025, with one templated CV, one panel interview and preference-based matching to sites. The second stage of ophthalmology works the same way: eight networks select from the college’s shortlist, and New South Wales and Queensland require a separate network application on top of the college one.

One thing about radiology is genuinely useful and almost nobody says it: RANZCR aligns interview questions to a standardised set of domains it sets nationally. The process is jurisdictional. The content of the interview is not.

→ Applying to training programs · Victorian registrar recruitment

Three: your employer selects you, and the college only accredits the training

The college accredits the hospital, sets the curriculum and runs the examinations. It does not pick the trainee. A hospital, network or state rotational scheme hires you, and you register with the college afterwards.

The Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) puts it plainly: “We don’t appoint trainees, this is done by the employer.” The Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) describes the same split. You must be employed by an accredited hospital, with sign-off from the site or network Director of Physician Education, before the college is involved. Psychiatry runs through state Branch Training Committees under RANZCP, which states that the process may vary by location.

This is the most fragmented group and the least well documented, and there is a reason to care beyond paperwork. With no central score and no entry examination, the interview and the referee reports are close to the whole decision. The interview matters most in exactly the group where least is published about it.

Two consequences for how you prepare. Your source is the state scheme or the network, not the college website. And a guide describing “the Basic Physician Training interview” as a five-station multiple mini interview is describing Western Australia; most other jurisdictions use a structured panel.

→ ANZCA: training as an anaesthetist · RACP: apply for physician training · RANZCP selection process

Four: there is no interview

Since the 2025 intake, entry to the Australian General Practice Training programme through both colleges has been decided by one online situational judgement test (SJT), the Casper test, delivered by Acuity Insights. No interview, no portfolio, no referee reports, no academic transcript. It runs 11 scenarios and 22 open-ended questions across roughly 65 to 85 minutes, remotely proctored, and it explicitly does not test clinical knowledge. For the 2027 intake there were more than 2,000 places across the two colleges.

Emergency medicine is the other case, and only at the college stage. ACEM selects into the FACEM Training Program on paper: a structured curriculum vitae, selection references and an institutional reference from your department director, reviewed by a Selection Subcommittee. There is no college interview and no entry examination.

Emergency medicine still involves an interview, but it is the hospital’s, for the registrar job. Two gates, only one of which has an interview in it, and they are run by different people to different criteria.

→ RACGP National Entry Assessment · How to apply to the FACEM Training Program

What this changes about your preparation

Find your architecture before you find your practice questions. Preparation for a single fifteen-minute panel is a different task from preparation for five ten-minute stations you rotate between, and both are different again from an SJT with a typing timer running.

Then read your own college’s or society’s regulations rather than a general guide. The numbers that decide how you should train are published per specialty and they differ: panels, minutes, weightings, attempt caps. General surgery runs five panels of ten minutes. Vascular surgery runs six. Cardiothoracic surgery runs at least three of twenty minutes each.

If your employer selects you, find the state scheme. The college page will tell you what the training involves and nothing useful about how you get in.

And check the year on anything you read. That is the single most common way candidates end up preparing for a process that no longer exists.

Which year is this actually about?

Australian colleges label selection documents by the year the selection round runs. You care about the year you would start. Those are different numbers, usually one apart, and they are used interchangeably across the internet by people who have not noticed.

RANZCOG’s own published roadmap for its selection changes labels one of its blocks “2026 (2027 intake)”. Read that block as “2026” and you will prepare for the wrong assessment by a full year. What it actually sets out is a three-year rebuild:

A selection round is named for the year it runs. An intake is named for the year you start. When a college says “2026 selection”, the people it is selecting begin in 2027.

Regulations are reissued every year, and they change. Orthopaedics moved the interview from 40% of the selection score to 60% between the 2025 and 2027 intakes. The AOA regulations state in their own text that they change annually.

Anything undated is unusable. A blog post describing an interview format without naming the intake year it applies to cannot be checked, and given the rate these formats move, it is as likely to be stale as current. That includes this page: every claim here is the 2027 intake position, and it will be revised when the colleges publish for 2028.

How this page is sourced

Every claim above is taken from the colleges’ and specialty societies’ own published selection documents for the 2027 intake, and links to them.

Where a college publishes nothing, this page says so rather than filling the gap. Clinical radiology publishes no interview weighting for Australian jurisdictions, because it does not run selection. Anaesthesia and Basic Physician Training publish none for the same reason. Dermatology confirms an MMI without publishing a station count. That is the actual state of what is public. A guide that gives you a number where the college gives none has invented it.

Acronyms