This research concentrated on observing academic student teachers’ teamwork, especially its effectiveness and their attitudes to collaboration and transformation, as well as their reflective, written self-assessments in relation to teamwork. Teams have been studied widely, but these kinds of special contexts are rare. The target group was higher education teachers, the context was an introduction of a new pedagogical program, and the teams acted under the guidance of mentors and occasional lecturers. Besides the content analysis, the study method was a deep analysis of the essays. The most effective positive influencers proved to be social exchanges, including mentoring, peer support, input for learning and the experiences of wellbeing. Individual distrust of working methods in teams, and emotional suspicions of their self-efficacy in transformational settings emerged as latent factors, revealing mainly the difficulty of changing traditional mindsets. The analyses offered individual and community-wide opportunities to steer education in the future.

Vocational education plays a pivotal role in nurturing talent and supporting national development. However, challenges such as outdated talent development concepts, insufficient teacher training, and a lack of attention to soft skills cultivation from both schools and students have hindered the comprehensive development of secondary vocational students. This study aims to explore the direct effect of perceived teachers’ transformational leadership on the soft skills of 324 secondary vocational students in China and to examine the mediating role of students’ self-efficacy in this relationship. Using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), the results show that teachers’ transformational leadership has a significant positive effect on students’ soft skills (β = 0.33, p < .01). Moreover, self-efficacy partially mediates this relationship (indirect effect β = 0.07, p < .05), accounting for 22.6% of the total effect. These findings suggest that teachers’ inspirational motivation, individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation directly foster students’ communication, teamwork, and problem-solving skills, while also indirectly strengthening them by enhancing students’ confidence. Practically, the study underscores the need for teacher training in transformational leadership and for policy initiatives that integrate soft skills into vocational curricula.