Across Europe, young adult unemployment remains an important issue. Those who have grown up in contexts of social and educational disadvantage can find it particularly difficult to find work. In response, governments, charitable foundations and in the rare case, researchers, have developed programmes of training and work-based learning to help them enter the workforce. These programmes aim to improve the young adults' work-readiness (also known as work-preparedness or career-readiness), which can be viewed as a set of competencies including career motivation, basic skills, job-specific skills, higher-order thinking skills, social skills and personal characteristics and attitude. Despite a growing literature on these competencies, major work-readiness programmes in Ireland and the UK are documented as trying to get young people into work quickly, rather than on enhancing their work-readiness thereby improving human capital. We examine this issue by reviewing work-readiness programmes' designs and outcomes, in relation to conceptualisations of work-readiness and Elder's (1998) life-course theory. In doing so we provide detail on how programmes connect to the socio-historical context, operate in relation to the school-to-work transition, impact young people through networks of linked lives and influence their agency in young adulthood and opportunity for cumulative agency throughout the life course.