The pandemic has caused major disruptions to psychiatric training programmes and therefore trainees across Europe. A particularly vulnerable group has been the senior trainees transitioning to specialist roles during this uncertain and highly challenging period. While trainees had to go through major difficulties with completing their clinical, academic and leadership requirements, trainers also struggled to find adaptive methods to ensure good quality training and clinical exposure. In this workshop we aim to bring together junior specialists with senior training leads to offer top tips to facilitate a smoother transitioning from trainee to specialist roles with or without the pandemic. The target audience will be psychiatric trainees as well as young specialists and academics. The Workshop will offer the enriching insight from Dr O’Loughlin who is leading one of the best reviewed psychiatry schools in the UK who will interactively discuss the projects they developed to maintain and improve training throughout the pandemic in a very severely affected western European country. Dr Kuzman will then share ways to manage academic activities and mentorship for psychiatric training despite the pandemic and discuss their learning outcomes with the Workshop participants. We will also hear from Dr Seker and Dr Zaja who themselves had to go through this transition during the height of the pandemic and are heavily involved with initiatives for European psychiatric training including the EFPT, EPA-ECPC, ESCAP and UEMS. Dr Seker will speak about how to maintain research involvement despite the disruption of the pandemic and interactively discuss methods to create new trainee-led training opportunities locally and on a European scale. Dr Zaja will recount his local and international experience going from the chief specialty trainee to the start-up specialist and focus on the clinical aspects of the process in a central European setting. The workshop will offer a lively, interactive experience overall and bring different perspectives from speakers with backgrounds as trainees, trainers, clinicians and academics.