Transprofessional competences of school teachers in the digital environment: education employers’ perspective

The shift towards digitalization in education, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic-related issues, has led to the emergence of a need to expand the borders of the teaching profession. To be effective in the digital environment, school teachers have to master new transprofessional competences (TPCs), enabling them to use the skill sets of other careers, gain new skills and abilities and find non-standard solutions to professional and pedagogical problems using digital technologies. This study investigated education employers’ opinions (61 principals and deputy principals from 31 Russian secondary schools) about the comparative importance of TPCs for school teachers working in the digital environment and their perceptions of what barriers prevent teachers from developing TPCs. The survey used a three-item questionnaire asking the respondents to rank the TPCs and the TPC clusters in order of importance for teachers working with the digital and to describe the obstacles to teachers’ TPC development. The findings revealed that the employers attached the greatest importance to psychological TPCs while assigning the least importance to digital citizenship TPCs. The major barriers to TPC development, in the respondents’ opinion, lay in teachers’ fear of new trends and their excessive workload. Based on the survey results, we designed a model of school teachers’ transprofessional competences in digital teaching and learning that can be used as an assessment tool in different professional settings. The paper concludes with suggestions on how to overcome the barriers and help improve school teachers’ TPC development.