Vocational education and training (VET) teachers are at the forefront of educational reforms aimed at shifting learning from school to company environments, also known as dual VET reforms. Yet little is known about their agency in this process. This article thus investigates the agency of schoolteachers impacted by the introduction of dual VET reforms in post-socialist, school-based VET systems. Interview transcripts conducted with VET school teach-ers, school directors, and VET experts in Albania and Slovakia provide data for the qualitative content analysis. The findings reveal that teacher agency is characterised by a multi-objective optimisation process between teachers’ absolute numbers of reimbursed working hours, their professional status and learner’s well-being. When navigating their agency through insecure educational reforms embedded within distinct structural and institutional pressures, teachers rely on their experience to estimate what coping strategy to adopt. They either block the intro-duction of dual VET reforms to maintain the status quo or embrace them as an opportunity to realise their material and professional interests. These insights are key when designing policy and capacity-increasing measure to ensure the buy-in of micro-level gatekeepers in education-al reforms.