In this talk we explain a simple treatment of the quantum Birkhoff normal form for semiclassical pseudo-differential operators with smooth coefficients. The normal form is applied to describe the discrete spectrum in a generalised non-degenerate potential well, yielding uniform estimates in the energy $E$. This permits a detailed study of the spectrum in various asymptotic regions of the parameters $(E,\hslash )$, and gives improvements and new proofs for many of the results in the field. In the completely resonant...