Many young people attending secondary education will do an apprenticeship by the end of their training, which will come as a new context of learning. The quality of this
new context can have differentiated impacts on student’s lives and on their vocational development. For many students, it can be their first formal and structured contact
with the workplace – experiencing a reality that, until then, has always been mediated by other sources and agents of information. Authors like Ducat (1980), Brooks et
al. (1995) and Super (1963) evoke the value of work experience as the most realistic way of vocational exploration. However, the efficiency of work experiences is
extremely variable (Ainley, P., 1990; Smith & Harris, 2000) and seems to depend significantly on factors like supervision, feedback, autonomy, learning opportunities and
peer support. Several studies suggest that the quality of the work experience and the exploratory behavior associated to this have a considerable influence on the
vocational development (e.g. Brooks et al.,1995; Carless & Prodan, 2003; Loughlin & Barling, 1998; Mortimer, 2003; Vondracek, 1997). The present study seeks to
highlight which qualities of the apprenticeship are predictors of career exploration in a group of students attending the 12th grade
