Recruitment Timelines Poll Result!

Table showing results for the poll

Hi everyone!

So, I had promised some analysis on the poll I previously ran found here: Recruitment Timelines Poll : r/RoyalAirForce. Please feel free to share this with people asking how long until they get in. As can be seen, it is a case of 'how long is a piece of string', and that's just for the people who took a month or less to get through medical/TMU.

If anyone has any ideas for other polls, AMAs or posts they'd like to see then feel free to comment and I will see what I can do.

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Tl;dr: MIOTC candidates should expect to start (or get a starting date at least) between 6 and 18 months, and take approximately 12 months on average (nobody in the comments gave timelines outside of my extremes). BRTC should hopefully not expect beyond 12 months but could start in under 4 months so make sure your fitness is at least on the path to passing PJFT before applying.

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The included graph is just to represent the results visually. The averages breakdown were calculated using some assumptions:

  • Midpoints for time ranges were used for mean calculation. If there is some interest I could make 2 polls (one for each of BRTC and MIOTC) to allow for more granularity in the time periods.
  • People followed the request for only inputting recent data that had not been impacted by drawn out medicals or other admin faff.
  • Poll responders are representative of the overall population of candidates.
  • Aircrew, ground and non-aptitude roles would have similar timelines for MIOTC even though non-aptitude don't do CBAT and ground roles don't do a post-OASC medical.
  • People wouldn't just lie... right?

The averages for the pathways are as follows:

MIOTC

Mean: 12.1 months

Mode: 12 to 18 months

Median: 12 to 18 months (not really valuable info here)

BRTC

Mean: 8.3 months

Mode: 8 to 12 months

Median: 8 to 12 months (not really valuable info here)

Honourable Mentions and Highlights:

Reports of multiple people taking 4 months or less to get into BRTC from scratch.

One poor sod who took 18 months to get into Halton, 5 months of which was spent waiting for a date after passing their PJFT. The date was then 3 months+ away. Odds are good you won't experience this but take not all of you 'I just passed my PJFT when should I quit college/my job?'.

One person got to OASC in 14 months, failed and was at BRTC 4 months later. They would have had to do a DAA and potentially a suitability interview still so that is some pace.

As usual, this is unofficial data and not meant to be fully representative of the recruitment process nor has any comment been made on the timelines. People don't tend to come onto the subreddit if things are going swimmingly so we may have a higher than average proportion of longer timelines. This is for a rough approximation of how long you can expect to take to get in only.