Apprenticeship – a system of technical-vocational training implemented through work contract in which someone learns a trade by working under a certified expert - was institutionalized in Brazil as a public policy in the 1940s, as a vehicle for the process of national industrialization. In the context of the process of redemocratization of the Brazilian State in the 1980s, it was reconfigured and, after decades of retraction of its national offer, emerged as the main vector of the right to professionalization of adolescents and young people, especially those in situations of social vulnerability and low income. Taking as a starting point the historical analysis of the processes of emergence, institutionalization and reconfiguration of apprenticeship, the main objective of this thesis is to investigate the constitution, still in progress, of its identity, its new meanings and its social and educational purposes. It will focus on the context of its expansion and consolidation, over the last two decades, as the most perennial and only national public policy centered on the school-work transition process. This investigation about the constitution of the new identity of the learning policy was guided by the analysis of the different interpretations held both by the state and the social actors involved in the implementation of the policy regarding its new purpose, which is to constitute itself as means to guarantee the right to professionalization. Based on Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), this thesis focused its analysis on the investigation of ideas, values and propositions of the policy subsystem, which is constituted by the set of different actors, state and social, that deal with the apprenticeship. The analysis highlights their beliefs, their conflicts and their impasses around the definitions about which problems need to be faced and the objectives and impacts to be achieved by the new learning policy. From this context of analysis, we sought to highlight to what extent this new identity, that emerges from the process of implementing the policy, is different from and similar to the correctional, assistance and technical models that marked learning throughout Brazilian history, and to point out the new directions that the policy is taking.