Resilience shields vocational teachers against burnout, large German survey finds

Vocational education teachers in Germany face their heaviest burden not from difficult students but from the sheer scope and complexity of their work, and resilience stands out as the only resource that significantly buffers the toll those demands take on burnout. That is the central finding of a new cross-sectional study of 1,470 vocational education and training teachers, published in Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training, which applied the widely used job demands–resources model to a professional group that has long remained on the margins of teacher stress research.

The research team, led by Max S. Lohner with Nina Marlene Sarochan and Carmela Aprea, surveyed teachers working at vocational schools in one German federal state between February and November 2022. The sample, which included no teachers holding management functions, was 56.9 percent female with a mean age of 44.89 years, and the authors report it was representative of the state with respect to gender, age group, job percentage, and regional council. Sixty percent of respondents worked full-time.

The descriptive results were striking. The single most frequently perceived demand was the heterogeneous performance prerequisites of students, with a mean of 4.45 on the five-point frequency scale, followed closely by the need to juggle many different tasks simultaneously at 4.34. Aggregated at the category level, task scope and complexity topped the list with a mean of 3.96, just ahead of teaching and interacting with learners at 3.93. At the other end of the spectrum, conflicts with other external institutions were rarely reported, and the category of external social demands, which includes conflicts with training organizations and legal guardians, had the lowest overall mean at 1.44.

For well-being, measured with the World Health Organization’s five-item WHO-5 questionnaire, the regression model explained 15.4 percent of the variance, with task scope and complexity showing the strongest negative association, followed by conflicts with school management. For overall job satisfaction, captured with a single item, the model explained 19.4 percent of the variance, and here school management emerged as the strongest negative predictor, followed by task scope and complexity. Burnout, assessed with the 12-item Burnout Assessment Tool covering exhaustion, mental distance, cognitive impairment, and emotional impairment, showed the strongest links of all: the demands explained 26.8 percent of the variance in total burnout and 27.1 percent in the exhaustion subscale, with task scope and complexity again the strongest predictor.

The moderation analyses produced the study’s most distinctive result. Of the four resources examined, resilience as measured by the Brief Resilience Scale, support from family and friends, support from colleagues, and support from school management, only resilience significantly moderated the relationship between job demands and burnout. In that model, which explained 40.7 percent of the variance, higher resilience was associated with lower burnout even in the presence of high job demands, with a statistically significant interaction effect. For well-being and job satisfaction, none of the four resources showed a significant moderating effect, and the same held for the three forms of social support with respect to burnout. Descriptive differences in simple slopes for family and friend support and colleague support pointed in the expected direction but did not reach statistical significance.

The descriptive picture of the sample’s mental health also warrants attention. According to the WHO questionnaire manual, the mean well-being value observed in this sample falls in the range that indicates poor well-being and would justify testing for depression. At the same time, the burnout measure indicated an average level of burnout, and the teachers’ mean resilience score of 3.22 was lower than the German norm sample value of 3.37 on the same scale. The authors interpret these patterns against the backdrop of a survey conducted in 2022, toward the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, a period that may have shaped teachers’ well-being and the way social support was practiced.

The study’s framing rests on the job demands–resources model, which holds that employee health results from a balance of negative job characteristics, the demands, and positive ones, the resources. The authors extend the model in one respect: rather than treating personal resources solely as individual capacities such as resilience, self-efficacy, or optimism, they use the term private resources to include social support from outside the working context, such as family and friends. This adaptation responds to earlier findings that non-work-related social support matters for teachers coping with job demands, and to calls in the literature for more nuanced examinations of teachers’ personal resources by the level at which they teach.

The focus on vocational education teachers is itself a contribution. Research on teacher stress has concentrated largely on primary and secondary schools, while vocational teachers face additional pressures arising from the dual character of vocational systems, including demands from both the education system and the labor market, and the need to keep pace with changes in their professional field. Earlier studies have found that vocational teachers show lower self-efficacy beliefs regarding classroom management and student engagement than teachers in other school forms, and less resilience and more stress than regular employees. A previous study on factors contributing to vocational teachers’ burnout found no clear results and concluded that the situation of these teachers is more complex than previously thought.

The authors are careful about the limits of their findings. The data are cross-sectional and self-reported, so the results reflect associations rather than causal mechanisms, and it is possible that the outcome variables influenced how teachers perceived their demands and resources. The survey covered a single federal state, participation was voluntary with possible self-selection bias, and no school-level indicators were recorded, which prevents multilevel analyses and means the number of participating schools is unknown. The scales measuring demands captured only how often challenges occurred, not how demanding they were perceived to be, and the German translations of the support scales have not yet been formally validated. The authors also note that resilience was measured as a trait-like personal resource, ego resiliency, rather than as the dynamic process the term can imply.

Despite these caveats, the practical implications are concrete. The authors argue that policymakers should aim to reduce job demands for teachers, especially those related to task scope and complexity, which encompasses workload, time pressure, and multitasking, characteristics not specific to vocational education and therefore potentially relevant to teachers more broadly. Whether social support plays a different role outside pandemic conditions, and how school management influences vocational teachers’ burnout in other contexts, remain open questions the authors recommend for future research.

Subject of Research: Job demands, resilience, and social support in relation to well-being, job satisfaction, and burnout among vocational education teachers in Germany

Article Title: Job demands and resources of vocational education teachers: the role of resilience and social support in well-being, job satisfaction, and burnout

Article References: Lohner, M. S., Sarochan, N. M., & Aprea, C. (2026). Job demands and resources of vocational education teachers: the role of resilience and social support in well-being, job satisfaction, and burnout. Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training, 18(1), Article 13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40461-026-00215-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40461-026-00215-w

Keywords: vocational education, teachers, job demands-resources model, burnout, resilience, social support, well-being, job satisfaction, Germany, occupational stress, cross-sectional survey, teacher mental health