Adults learning effectively across their lengthening working life has become a key personal and social imperative. In distinct ways, addressing governmental, workplace and worker concerns and goals are all associated with working age adults’ employability. That is, as far as they are able, to become and remain currently occupationally competent, contribute to their workplaces’ viability, furnish the goods and services that their communities want and need and, collectively, contribute to the economic and social well-being of their nation state. Achieving these outcomes requires accounting for the duality of how economic and work changes are manifested, and individuals’ engagement in, learning for and negotiating working lives progresses. This includes accounting for and negotiating changing work requirements, the organisation and processes adopted by workplaces and changes to them. These are central to individuals’ employability, as they comprise how paid work is undertaken, what and how they can learn, and their performance is judged. These changes can also challenge workers’ sense of self and impact their confidence and agency as learners. This is particularly the case when they must negotiate key transitions brought about by relocation, changes in occupations, work, or personal and family circumstances. Learning for and through such transitions is premised in individuals’ abilities and readiness to engage effectively in work activities, the support provided by workplaces, educational provisions and communities always mediated by their own agency, capacities and readiness. So, there is a need to understand further about how workers come to engage in and actively learn through and for their work life and negotiate worklife transitions. Hence, this opening chapter of this volume discusses the premises for needing to understand what constitutes learning across working life and adults’ learning and development across lengthening working lives. As a means of elaborating these issues, it also overviews the premises of a program of research that informs the contributions to this volume, before elaborating the contributions of each of the chapters to understandings about adults’ learning across working life. In sum, it seeks to both introduce, foreshadow, and summarise the key contributions about adults’ worklife learning.