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The development of learning opportunities for working students is increasingly being recognised as a key mechanism for transferring skills and knowledge from the academic environment and embedding them in working practice. The aim of this review is to explore and describe working students' experience of online learning. The article presents a systematic review of studies evaluating the experience of formal online learning by working students in the UK, with a synthesis of the evidence using a thematic analysis grounded in the data. Literature searches identified 41 relevant studies. Five key themes influencing the learning experience of students emerged from the data: peer communication, support, flexibility, knowledge validation, and course presentation and design. Given that the effectiveness of online learning is mediated by the learning experience, there is a need for course designers, developers and facilitators to take careful account of these issues if they are to enhance working students' experience of e-learning. Course providers need to address presentation quality, offer flexibility and mechanisms for support and rapid assessment, and develop effective and efficient means of enabling communication, especially among the learners themselves. This synthesis offers a new means for understanding the experience of formal online learning for those in employment, which in turn can be used to inform the design and delivery of courses for work-based learners.