Today schools and departments of public health (SDPHs), as well as public health professionals are searching for interface and synergies between public health science and practice. They are increasingly relying on partnerships in order to achieve common goals. To collect more information on the fragmented institutional landscape the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER) organised a survey among its full institutional 81 members with the core objective to assess the exit competences of master of public health graduates according to the new Essential Public Health Operations (EPHO) of WHO-EURO. The survey results indicate that usually European SDPHs are small units, funded from tax money. A total of 130 academic programmes released 3035 graduates per last year All selected competences within each EPHO showed high reliability and high internal consistency (alpha>0.75, p<0.01). SDPH assess their best teaching output to be in the field of health promotion, followed by disease prevention and identification of priority health problems and health hazards in the community, while they see the least success regarding preparedness and planning for public health emergencies. Given the fragmentation of the institutional infrastructure, the harmonization of programme content and thinking is impressive. Even more surprising is the observation that the determination of the desired performance by employers of public health professionals for most EPHOs (6 out of 10) is almost congruent with the estimated output of SDPHs. The main objective of the workshop was to continue with permanent dialogue on innovation and good practice in public health education, continuing training and lifelong learning and to strengthen everlasting collaboration of European schools in efforts to improve public health performance.