Health professions education has undergone radical changes over the past 100 years. This has necessitated a shift away from education programmes largely focused on testing knowledge and skills using predominantly written examinations. There has been a shift towards programmes which are intentionally designed with the end product in mind, a competent practitioner, who is able to provide safe, effective and efficient patient-centred health care. This major paradigm shift has placed an increased emphasis on what health care practitioners do in real clinical practice and the need for assessment processes which provide a holistic overview of trainees' progress towards, and achievement of specified abilities required to undertake independent, unsupervised clinical practice. Such assessment processes, necessarily situated in the workplace, are collectively referred to as Workplace-Based Assessment (WBA). This paper provides an overview of the current state of WBA in health professions education, the challenges that need to be addressed and suggestions about the way forward. It is intended as an introductory text to the topic and a source of useful references to more detailed texts in the literature.