Purpose: Education depends on high-quality teachers who are committed to professional development and do not get burned out. The purpose of this paper was to investigate how job demands and resources can affect the health and cognitive development of teachers using the Demand-Induced Strain Compensation model. Design/methodology/approach: A cross-sectional sample of 120 teachers in vocational education was used to investigate the proposed relationships and hypotheses with Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression method. Findings: In terms of teacher health and development, significant main effects were found for several predictors. Autonomy was significantly and negatively related to emotional exhaustion. Autonomy, emotional supervisor and colleague support were significantly and positively related to teachers' development. However, little support was found for matching hypotheses, suggesting that matching demands and resources do not offer more explanatory power for occupation outcomes than other types of interaction effects. Research limitations/implications: More powerful analyses techniques like structural equation modeling could be used in future research with a larger sample size. A second limitation is common method variance. Practical implications: Schools in vocational education should provide sufficient job resources, such as autonomy and emotional support, but possibly also put a limit on teacher task variety. Originality/value: Job demands and resources have until now mainly been related to negative outcomes such as poor health and ill-being, while the relationship with learning has also been hypothesized and is therefore meaningful to examine. In addition, it was investigated whether interaction effects of matching demands and resources, better explain these outcomes.