Faced with recruitment difficulties, financial stringency, changing public needs and important advances in clinical and academic psychiatry, the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of the education and training of psychiatrists and factors influencing recruitment to psychiatry. The Conference, held in Cambridge in March, providing a forum for the discussion of such issues involving the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the AUTP and APIT, was an imaginative concept which deserved widespread support within the specialty. However, the breadth of the conception meant that for some organizers and participants it was a conference on training, and for others it was mainly concerned with recruitment.