Rethinking the Function of Educators in the Era of Intelligent Technologies: Digital Soft Skills as a Driver of Teacher Professional Satisfaction

Background. As artificial intelligence(AI) recalibrates the limits of professional knowledge work, the teaching profession faces a structural paradox: Educators are called upon to be both agents of digital transformation and its least prepared participants. Current frameworks — DigCompEdu, TPACK, UNESCO AI Guidelines — address competence structures but systematically under-theorise how the psychosocial dimensions of digital adoption coalesce into competencies that support potential professional satisfaction and retention (Mishra & Koehler, 2006; Redecker, 2017; UNESCO, 2023). Unfortunately, this diversity has not yet been reflected in Baltic educational contexts where systemic soft skill development remains fragmented and empirically underexplored (European Commission, 2020).

Aim. In this paper, we introduce national research project whose purpose is to provide an empirically grounded soft skills development model for the Lithuanian educators, which clearly outlines how five distinct clusters of soft skills relate to teacher professional satisfaction within the lifelong learning paradigm (incl. improving digital literacy and AI competencies as structurally dominant & fastest-evolving cluster) (Chen et al., 2024; Falloon, 2020).

Methodology. The research methodology is based on a three-stage mixed-methods approach. First, a literature review is conducted using data from the Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, and PsycINFO databases. The literature was collected from Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan. This is followed by a thematic synthesis to understand the underlying mechanisms and the limitations of the methods. Second, a quantitative survey is conducted in Lithuania, involving teachers from all 10 counties and 2000 respondents from the education sector. The survey questions were determined based on the results of the literature review and covered respondents’ opinions on: soft skills and how important these skills are for successful teaching, depending on the age group; In this article, we discuss how educators assess their digital literacy and artificial intelligence (AI) competencies. We also examine how they develop soft skills and what obstacles they encounter.