The study, led by Shahzad Haider of the School Education Department in Lasbela, Balochistan, together with colleagues from institutions across Sindh and Lahore, was designed as a qualitative descriptive investigation rooted in an interpretivist paradigm. Rather than measuring competence through standardized tests or administrative metrics, the researchers wanted to understand the phenomenon through the eyes of the people who live it daily. Ten university teachers were selected using criterion-based purposive sampling, a technique that deliberately recruits participants who possess direct, relevant experience of the issue under investigation. Semi-structured interviews formed the backbone of the data collection, allowing participants to speak at length while the interviewers gently steered the conversation toward the study’s core concerns.

Once the interviews were transcribed, the team turned to an inductive, codebook-informed thematic analysis—a method that lets patterns emerge from the data itself rather than forcing responses into predetermined categories. The analysis converged on a single overarching theme: professional factors shaping professional competence. Beneath that umbrella, five interrelated subthemes surfaced, each representing a distinct strand of the teachers’ understanding: professional attitude, professional development, ICT proficiency, research competence, and change management. Together, these five strands form what the authors describe as a situated and multidimensional form of practice, one that cannot be divorced from the institutional conditions in which it unfolds.

The first strand, professional attitude, speaks to the ethical and dispositional heart of teaching. Participants framed competence not merely as knowing one’s subject but as embodying a commitment to students, to integrity, and to the responsibilities of the profession itself. This aligns with a long tradition in the competence literature, which has repeatedly distinguished between technical skill and the moral orientation that gives that skill meaning. In the Balochistan context, where public universities operate under significant resource pressures, the teachers suggested that attitude functions as a kind of internal compass—sustaining professional behavior even when external incentives and support structures fall short.

Professional development emerged as the second pillar, and here the findings carry a pointed institutional message. The teachers described continuous learning as essential to staying effective, yet they also pointed to uneven access to structured development opportunities across the province’s public universities. The study situates this within a broader Pakistani debate: earlier research has documented how professional development programs can enhance university teachers’ knowledge, but also how provision remains inconsistent. The Balochistan participants’ accounts suggest that where formal programs are scarce, competence becomes something teachers must actively construct for themselves—through reading, peer exchange, and self-directed experimentation with new methods.

Perhaps the most contemporary of the five subthemes is ICT proficiency. The teachers identified digital readiness as an increasingly non-negotiable dimension of professional competence, shaped by the global transformation of higher education and the growing expectation that faculty can navigate learning platforms, digital resources, and technology-mediated pedagogy. This finding echoes international work linking digital competence to teachers’ conceptions of teaching, as well as recent Pakistani studies examining readiness for technology-rich approaches such as STEM education. In Balochistan, however, the researchers note that digital infrastructure itself is unevenly distributed, meaning that a teacher’s ICT proficiency is partly a function of institutional investment rather than individual effort alone.

Research competence formed the fourth strand, reflecting the dual mandate of modern universities: teaching and knowledge production. Participants described scholarly engagement—publishing, conducting studies, staying current with their disciplines—as integral to their professional identity and to the quality of their classroom work. Yet the study highlights that research support in the region’s public universities is limited, creating a gap between the expectations placed on faculty and the resources available to meet them. The teachers’ perspectives suggest that research competence is not simply an individual attribute but a capacity that institutions either nurture or neglect, with consequences for both academic output and student learning.

The fifth subtheme, change management, captures the adaptive dimension of competence. Universities everywhere are being reshaped by technological disruption, evolving student expectations, and shifting policy landscapes, and Balochistan’s public universities are no exception. The teachers in the study described adaptability—the ability to respond constructively to institutional and technological change—as a defining feature of professional competence. This reframes competence as inherently dynamic: what counted as a competent lecturer a decade ago may fall short today, and the professional teacher is one who can read the winds of change and adjust practice accordingly.

The authors are careful about the limits of their work. Because the study is qualitative and interpretive, it cannot establish causal relationships between any particular factor and measured teaching outcomes. What it offers instead is a rich interpretation of how teachers in a specific context make sense of competence—a contribution the researchers argue is overdue, given how little higher education research has focused on Balochistan. The methodological transparency, from the ethics approvals granted by institutional review boards to the written informed consent obtained from all participants before any interviews were recorded, underscores the rigor behind the findings. The authors also declare no competing interests and note that the study received no external funding.

The practical implications, however, are clear and actionable. The study recommends that institutions provide structured professional development, invest in research and ICT capacity building, and cultivate reflective leadership to strengthen professional competence across public universities. In effect, the researchers argue that competence is a shared project: teachers bring attitude and adaptability, but universities must supply the scaffolding—training, infrastructure, and research support—that allows those qualities to flourish. For policymakers in Pakistan and for higher education leaders in similarly under-resourced regions worldwide, the message is that investing in faculty capability is not a luxury but a precondition for institutional quality. As digital transformation accelerates and expectations on universities multiply, the Balochistan study reminds us that the question of what makes a teacher competent is ultimately a question about the systems we build around them—and whether those systems are designed to help educators grow, or left to let them improvise alone.

Subject of Research: University teachers' perceptions of professional factors influencing professional competence in public universities of Balochistan, Pakistan

Article Title: University teachers’ perspectives on professional factors influencing professional competence: a qualitative study in public universities of Balochistan, Pakistan

Article References: Haider, S., Ahmed, S. T., Imran, M., Oad, L., Shaikh, N., & Yaqoob, N. (2026). University teachers’ perspectives on professional factors influencing professional competence: a qualitative study in public universities of Balochistan, Pakistan. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 465. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01752-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01752-7

Keywords: professional competence, university teachers, professional development, ICT proficiency, research competence, change management, Balochistan, Pakistan, higher education, qualitative study, teacher attitudes, public universities

The study, published in the journal Discover Education, was conducted by Zafer Algül and Osman Nejat Akfırat of Kocaeli University. Rather than treating burnout as a single global score, the team modeled it as a multidimensional phenomenon, distinguishing job-related burnout, physical and emotional burnout, alienation or depersonalization directed at students, and alienation directed at colleagues and administrators. Self-efficacy, too, was broken into four facets—academic, professional, social, and intellectual—while teachers’ appraisals of their work environment were captured through four dimensions of perceived work-related motivational conditions: physical facilities, in-school factors, out-of-school factors, and professional development and prestige.

The theoretical backbone of the study is a resource-informed occupational stress perspective, drawing on the job demands–resources (JD-R) tradition. In this framing, personal resources such as self-efficacy beliefs and contextual resources such as supportive working conditions can buffer the strain that leads to burnout. What distinguishes the new work is its insistence on domain specificity: the researchers hypothesized that a teacher’s confidence in managing instructional demands would not necessarily predict the same outcomes as confidence in navigating social relationships within the school, and that different environmental appraisals would likewise attach to different burnout facets.

Data were collected between May and June 2022 through both online surveys and paper-and-pencil questionnaires administered across 57 schools in a large metropolitan area in western Türkiye. After screening for multivariate outliers using Mahalanobis distance, the analytic sample for structural equation modeling was 740 teachers. Missing data, which were minimal at less than 0.13 percent per item, were handled with full-information maximum likelihood estimation, and the models were fitted in Python using the semopy package with robust sandwich-type standard errors to accommodate mild non-normality in the Likert-type responses.

The measurement phase of the study was rigorous. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a 12-factor structure covering the four self-efficacy facets, four motivational condition dimensions, and four burnout facets. Convergent validity was supported by average variance extracted values exceeding 0.50, composite reliability exceeded 0.70 across all latent dimensions, and the heterotrait–monotrait ratio peaked at 0.74, comfortably below the conventional 0.85 threshold for discriminant validity problems. A single-factor model—a common diagnostic for shared method variance—fit the data poorly by comparison, with a substantial difference in CFI of 0.506, suggesting that the multidimensional structure was not an artifact of self-report methodology alone.

The structural results were striking for their selectivity. Of all the paths connecting self-efficacy facets to appraisals of work conditions, only two emerged as statistically significant: social self-efficacy was positively associated with in-school factors such as collegial collaboration and administrative support, while professional self-efficacy was positively associated with out-of-school factors such as community expectations and broader perceptions of the teaching profession. The models explained only 5 to 12 percent of the variance in the motivational condition dimensions, a finding the authors interpret as evidence that factors outside the model—leadership practices, school climate, workload, and organizational support—likely play a larger role in shaping how teachers appraise their circumstances.

Direct links between self-efficacy and burnout were similarly concentrated. Professional self-efficacy, which reflects confidence in managing core instructional and professional role demands, showed small but reliable negative associations with job-related burnout and with student alienation and depersonalization. Social, academic, and intellectual self-efficacy, by contrast, showed no significant direct associations with any burnout facet once covariates were accounted for. This pattern suggests that professional efficacy may operate as a targeted protective resource for the specific strains—exhaustion with the job itself and emotional distancing from students—that most closely mirror the demands of the instructional role.

The clearest and strongest findings concerned the environment. Perceived professional development and prestige opportunities were negatively associated with job-related burnout, while in-school factors showed negative associations with both physical and emotional burnout and, most strongly, with colleague and administrator alienation, where the standardized coefficient reached −0.507. Teachers who saw their school’s internal conditions—collaboration, communication, administrative support, school climate—more favorably reported substantially less relational distancing from the people around them. Out-of-school factors, meanwhile, were largely unrelated to burnout once the other dimensions were in the model. The burnout dimensions were explained to a moderate degree, with the model accounting for 17 to 28 percent of their variance.

Notably, bootstrapped tests of indirect associations, based on 5,000 resamples, did not reach statistical significance. In other words, the data did not support the idea that appraisals of working conditions act as a pathway transmitting the effect of self-efficacy beliefs onto burnout. The authors are careful to emphasize that the findings represent direct cross-sectional associations rather than causal mediation, and that the cross-sectional design cannot establish temporal ordering—burnout, after all, could just as plausibly erode self-efficacy and darken appraisals of working conditions over time.

A distinctive contribution of the study is its comparison of public and private school teachers. Before any group comparisons could be made, the researchers established measurement invariance hierarchically, testing configural, metric, and scalar models. The changes in approximate fit indices were minimal—change in CFI no greater than 0.006 and change in RMSEA no greater than 0.002—supporting scalar invariance and licensing meaningful latent mean comparisons. Those comparisons revealed that private school teachers scored higher on social and intellectual self-efficacy, with standardized mean differences of 0.31 and 0.28 respectively. Crucially, however, a multi-group SEM comparing unconstrained and path-constrained models showed almost no fit decrement (change in CFI of 0.003), indicating that the pattern of structural associations was statistically indistinguishable across the two sectors. In plain terms, public and private school teachers differed in baseline levels of some resources, but the architecture linking beliefs, conditions, and burnout was the same for both groups.

The authors acknowledge a series of limitations that temper interpretation. Because unique school identifiers were not retained in the de-identified dataset, the analysis could not correct for the likely clustering of teachers within schools, meaning some standard errors may be underestimated and small effects treated with caution. The data were collected in a post-disruption period following earlier phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, the sample came from a single region rather than a nationally representative frame, gender was assessed in binary form, and no formal multiple-testing correction was applied across the many structural paths. Sensitivity analyses—re-running the models with and without outlier-flagged cases, comparing maximum likelihood with robust estimation, and toggling covariate adjustment—confirmed that the focal associations were stable.

Even with these caveats, the practical implications are pointed. The findings suggest that burnout-prevention programs built exclusively on individual resilience training or generic self-efficacy boosting may miss the mark. Because the most consistent burnout associations involved teachers’ appraisals of school-embedded conditions, interventions such as protected time for collaborative planning, structured peer support teams, transparent workload allocation, mentoring, and credible, competence-linked professional recognition may be more promising targets. The invariance of the structural pattern across public and private schools suggests these strategies could apply across sectors, with delivery adapted to local constraints rather than redesigned from scratch.

The study also carries a methodological message for the research field: averaging burnout into a single score can obscure precisely the domain-specific relationships that matter for theory and intervention. A teacher’s professional confidence may guard against exhaustion and withdrawal from students while doing little for physical and emotional fatigue, and no personal belief may substitute for a collegial, well-supported school environment when it comes to maintaining relationships with colleagues and administrators. As the authors conclude, understanding and preventing teacher burnout likely requires attending simultaneously to what teachers believe about their capabilities and to what they experience, day to day, in the schools where those capabilities are exercised.