This paper explores the role of the stage (i.e. a brief period of internship integrated into a mainly school-based VET /PET program) as a tool for promoting students’ learning in the Italian (non-dual) VET/PET system. Our study was realized in a high school in a northern town of Italy and adopts activity theory as a lens to consider school as an activity system, and to focus on the relationship between school and work as a relationship between two different systems. In our presentation, we will describe the different aspects at stake in realizing various types of stages, and we will discuss different (i.e. systemic, organizational and individual) levels that are fundamental with respect to its quality and success. In particular, we will address the following issues: (1) We will explicate students’ increasing competence and identity development by using Bruner’s self-indicators; (2) Moreover, we will stress how stu-dents’ attitudes change as they become responsible for the organization of the stag-es in different ways during the three final years of the high school; (3) In order to highlight the change of the systems – school and work – we will also present the new procedures that both organizations adopted substituting the old ones.