Can you change jobs during your CF without losing hours?

"Can I leave in the middle of a segment?" is one of the most-asked questions among Clinical Fellows, and the answers people get are contradictory. Here is the part that actually decides it.

The rule that matters

ASHA states it plainly:

If a Clinical Fellow completes a partial segment that did not include at least 6 hours of direct and 6 hours of indirect supervision from their CF mentor prior to changing settings/employers, the new CF mentor cannot make up any mentorship hours that were deficient from the previous setting.

Read that carefully, because it is narrower and more useful than the panic version.

It is not "you lose everything if you leave." It is a rule about supervision, not about your hours worked. What it says is that a deficiency in one setting stays in that setting. Your incoming supervisor cannot go back and fix it, no matter how willing they are.

So the question to ask before you resign is not "will I lose my hours?" It is:

Has my current supervisor already given me 6 hours of direct and 6 hours of indirect supervision in this segment?

If yes, the partial segment stands on its own supervision and the change is clean. If no, that shortfall cannot be repaired later by anybody.

What this means in practice

Time the move to a segment boundary if you have any choice. Two weeks of patience can be worth several hundred hours. If you know a move is coming, find out where your boundaries actually fall — the segment planner puts them in real dates.

If you cannot choose the timing, front-load the supervision. Ask for the direct observation hours now rather than later in the segment. Supervisors generally schedule observation when it suits the calendar; there is nothing stopping you asking for it early, and a supervisor who knows you are leaving usually understands why.

Check where the segment actually stands before you hand in notice. The supervision checker will tell you whether you are above or below the 6-and-6 line right now.

Each job is its own report

ASHA asks you to:

Enter each period/portion of the experience as a separate report on your certification online application if you change settings, mentors, or the number of hours you work per week.

Three triggers, and the third catches people out: changing your weekly hours starts a new report even at the same job with the same supervisor. Going from full-time to part-time, or picking up PRN work, is a reportable change.

If you work in two settings at once — a school full-time and a SNF on PRN, say — ASHA requires that your supervisor "evaluate all skills in each setting during each segment." Two settings means two evaluations per segment, not one.

Before you leave, in this order

1. Get your log current and acknowledged. Your supervisor enters the final numbers in ASHA's portal, so the time to agree on them is while they still remember. A supervisor who has already moved on is one who cannot confirm anything.
2. Get your skills rated for the portion they observed. Ratings become guesswork once memory fades.
3. Confirm your incoming supervisor is eligible before your first day under them — an active CCC, nine months of practice after it, and two hours of supervision training. Hours earned under an ineligible supervisor do not count at all, and starting a new job is exactly when nobody thinks to check.
4. Ask ASHA directly about your specific case. Which brings us to the honest limit of this page.

What ASHA does not say

ASHA's published guidance addresses what happens to supervision in a partial segment. It does not explicitly state whether the clinical hours themselves survive an incomplete segment.

We are not going to guess at that. Individual circumstances vary enough — how far into the segment, how much supervision was delivered, whether the settings overlapped — that a documented answer from ASHA certification for your situation is worth considerably more than an inference from any website, this one included.

What you should not do is wait. A job change discovered at application time, with an incomplete log and no ratings for the previous supervisor's portion, is a much harder conversation than the same change flagged and documented as it happened.

Confirm anything consequential against ASHA's Clinical Fellowship guide.