This study shows that during clinical clerkships, students actively seek feedback according to personal and interpersonal factors. Perceived costs and benefits influenced this active feedback-seeking behaviour. These results may contribute towards the optimising and developing of meaningful educational opportunities during clerkships.

These findings illustrate the relevance of generic competencies for new hospital consultants. Furthermore, social support facilitates this intense and stressful stage within the medical career.

These outcomes are in line with theoretical notions regarding innovations in general and may be helpful in the implementation of other innovations in PGME. Given the substantial effects of innovations outside the strictly education-related domain, individuals designing and implementing innovations should consider all potential effects, including those identified in this study.

The CanMEDS framework appears to offer relevant building blocks for specialty specific postgraduate training, which should be combined with the results of an exploration of specialty specific competencies to arrive at a postgraduate curriculum that is in alignment with professional practice.

The importance of contextual aspects in the transition is underscored and shows that Denmark appears to succeed better in aligning training with practice. Regulations regarding working hours and progressive independence of trainees appear to facilitate the transition.