School-based education can be a context of adversity for some youth. Research has identified the value of work-based education in serving as a context of resilience to support individual-level factors including agency and autonomy, but researchers are increasingly highlighting the need for examining the influence of contextual factors. In this paper, we argue for a conceptual framework that integrates recent social cognitive theories focused on the individual within a person-in-context model (DeLuca et al., 2012) in order to identify why work-based education can be a context of resilience. We identify facets in the individual, social and cultural, and political and economic domains that can be applied to school-based education in order to keep students from becoming disengaged.