Introduction: One of the approaches to explaining the relationship between education and the world of work, and reducing the gap between students’ knowledge and their professional needs is competency-based curriculum. Due to its unique characteristics, competency-based curriculum has been noticed recently by educational systems of various countries especially in medical education. Given the importance of competency approach in medical education, this paper attempts to explain this approach.

Methods: This paper is a review study. The keywords competence, competency, competency-based curriculum and learning outcomes in the field of medical education were used for searching through the databases of Sagepub, ProQuest, Google Scholar, Magiran and SID from 1990-2014.

Results:A total of 52 publications were reviewed. Graduates’ professional needs are of great importance in competency-based curriculum in medical education and elements of the curriculum and competency models are closely tied with these needs in any field.

Conclusion: The quality of the educational system could be improved by recognition of the competency approach, the characteristics and elements of the curriculum in this approach, and also the process of designing and planning competency-based curriculum and its implementation.