In the context of the series on education and the dentist in 2025, the directors of education and training at the 3 dentistry programmes in the Netherlands were asked about the kind of dentist they are training. If, after all, the head of a dental practice is looking for a new colleague and has 3 candidates, each from a different faculty, what can he expect of each of them and are there differences in the ‘kind of dentist’ they are? In the spring of 2019, Geerling Langenbach and Corine Visscher of the ACTA (Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam), Nico Creugers and Ohlin Cremers of the Radboud University in Nijmegen and Luc van der Sluis and Berdien Kooistra-Akse of the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen were interviewed one after another by Denise van Diermen, guest editor of the series ‘Education and the dentist in 2025’.