Policy makers place increasing emphasis on the importance of lifelong learning in enabling more people, not just the registered unemployed, who are out of the labour force to move back into employment, or even into employment for the first time. However, there is very little reliable evidence on the economic effects of formal learning undertaken by adults. This article reports research on a cohort of British women in their 30s who initially were not in employment, using event history analysis to examine the factors which influenced transitions into employment between 1991 and 2000.The key finding is that, in the presence of a full range of controls, lifelong learning, defined in terms of obtaining qualifications as an adult, substantially increases the likelihood that labour-market inactive women will make a transition to paid employment.