Occupational stress describes in several easy. The US National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety explains that occupational stress is a harmful emotional and physical reaction that occurs for several reasons. It could result in incompetent results and unfavorable performance at school, college, and university in students. In job employees, it could occur due to the lack of compatibility between demands and necessities of the job. Furthermore, occupational stress is an eternal condition due to circumstances in the working environment that drastically affect an individual’s employment progress ( Yahaya, Yahaya, Arshad, Ismail, & Jaalam, 2009 ).

In other words, occupational stress contributes to disagreeable physiological consequences that get heightened in individuals due to hopelessness and powerlessness to cope with the demands from environmental factors ( Miller, 2005 ). The study was conducted to compare the occupational stress of male and female heads from a secondary section in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. 402 secondary school heads participated in the survey through multistage sampling technique amongst 260 were males, and 142 were females. Descriptive and quantitative research design brought along with statistical analysis results that both males and females were seen as overly stressed. The reasons withdrew including irrational political pressure, exhausting working conditions, work overload, under participation, unprofitability, role conflict. Besides, there was no difference between the level of stress of males and females. The finding suggested that education departments from the elementary and secondary departments should collaborate with policymakers to design comprehensive strategies for stress reduction. The policies will remarkably bring improve and improve their work efficiency ( Yusoff et al., 2010 ).

Multiple researchers have discovered that turnover rates of the working forces bring an increase in occupational stress. Hence, it contributes to numerous difficulties and hindrances in organizations. The factors may comprise loss of efficiency, time pressure, insufficient health resources, or excessive or less work. Negative factors in the work environment also trigger social and psychological stress ( Wadesango, Gudyanga, & Mberewere, 2015 ).

University life is an essential part for every student; this stage requires making various academic life, social life, and leisure activities ( Baker, 2003 ). This period is full of struggles that students make for achieving their hopes and expectations of their parents and excellent academic achievement ( Smith & Renk, 2007 ). In this era, the common concept exists that a degree from a reputable university is nothing but a “pathway” to a desirable job and income ( Binder et al., 2016 ). This concept leads students to develop stress, primarily educational stressors ( Sreeramareddy, Shankar, Binu, Mukhopadhyay, & Menezes, 2007 ). Most studies and surveys expose that overload of study, high competition, non-realistic approach for goals, too many expectations, lack of opportunities, and responsibilities and pressure of study are the main causes of high-stress levels ( Sinha, Sharma, & Nepal, 2007 ). In addition to that ( Smith & Renk, 2007 ) highlighted that completing deadline to complete the academic assignments and tests are one of the leading causes of stress. Students think about it seriously because of grade competition that they have to maintain their success in a limited time ( Sinha, Sharma, & Nepal, 2007 ).

Stress occurs due to various reasons. Stress is the body’s reaction to mental, psychological, and physiological condition that occurs in response to any extreme condition ( Franken, 1994 ). Stress triggers in various ways to students; it can cause failure in academic achievement, financial problems, and others. The impact of stress can lead a student to a prolonged emotional disturbance if not dealt with positively. However, the university helps in developing psychosocial development. Academic activities are evaluated by students’ performance and their time management skills ( Zimmerman, Greenberg, & Weinstein, 2023 ).

Prior research exposed that in university phase students go through depression ( Brown & Ralph, 1999 ). However, candidates in their first year are most likely to develop a higher level of stress. Owing to the change from college to university life ( Lane, 2020 ). Students who fail to settle down depressive symptoms during the transition period can deteriorate in their performance academically and bring psychological pressure ( Freyhofer et al., 2021 ).

A large number of researches undertaken so far to analyze the association between stress and academic success among university candidates. Overall results show that stress has pessimistic influence on students’ academic attainment. ( Elias et al., 2011 ) Students reported the feeling of stress increase when we talk about grade battling. They have plenty of information to study but limited time to consume, so this causes them to get stress ( Carveth, Gesse, & Moss, 1996 ). Moreover, Jahan et al. (2022) has pointed out that stress is related with unsatisfactory academic outcome significantly. Further studies in the Malaysian context have the same findings.

Besides, researchers including ( Ross, Niebling, & Heckert, 1999 ) have supported the finding that university requires plenty of requirements such as increased academic workload, constraint to achieve and keep up good grades, developing good relations with new individuals around, and practical time management skills that students need to modify. If students fail to confront demands, they put up with stress. Moreover, it hurts their self-esteem that results in poor mental health conditions and weakened memory.

Primarily researchers have discovered that university students incorporate upper level of stress worldwide. Facts and figures provide prove that majority of students remain unable to compete with difficult academic tasks efficiently. As a result, they are more expected to have a upper level of psychological destruction. If stress is extended, it affects academic performance negatively. Moreover, it impacts students’ time management skills drastically ( Richlin-Klonsky & Hoe, 2003 ).

Burnout is globally spread marvel. The term is explained as the state of extended somatic and psychosomatic fatigue. Most of the students experience it especially medical students due to the over-burden of studies. A study by Cazolari et al. (2020) was conducted to analyze the prevalence and psychological determinants of burnout midst medical students in Pakistan. Most of the students were female and were studying in the third year of MBBS. About 30.6% of people were found to have a high level of burnout ( Cazolari et al., 2020 ).

In this fast-paced era, competition has grown high, and stress has become a detrimental part of life. The education system has increased its demands that have less emotional strain and anxiety. Medical is the field that incorporates high outcomes so. It requires extensive research. Therefore, medical students come up with intense and demanding issues during their studies. The study researched and concluded that students experienced an elevated level of anxiety, depression, and GAD (General Anxiety Disorder). The survey was directed at Surat Medical College, Pakistan. The cross-sectional questionnaire-based study discovered approximately all students reported they were going through stress feelings. 40% of students were at the severe level by ( Solanky et al., 2012 ).

Motivation for achievement is not a single construct. Still, it submerges different constructs, including goals, tasks values, self-concepts, and achievement motives. Numerous studies have identified various motivational constructs as predictors that relate to school students’ academic achievement. Moreover, most motivational constructs get on with academic achievement and intelligence and student’s ability to identify self-concept and task values ( Wu et al., 2021 ). These both are the powerful aspects in predicting achievement than goals and other motives. The research tested current and prior grades of students with domainspecific ability, including self-concept, task values, explanations, and learning objectives ( Uji & Kawaguchi, 2021 ). The results revealed implications for interrogating motivational constructs with several theoretical foundations ( Steinmayr et al., 2019 ).

Another research took place to regulate the impact of academic distress on students’ presentation. It has been a long time to study stress in the academic field. Researchers have discovered various essential stressors, including burden of assignments, u among classmates, unbalanced competition, fear of failure in the academic ground, and financial problems ( Fairbrother & Warn, 2003 ) in addition to that, poor interpersonal relationships and family problems are also the reasons ( Ongori, 2007 ; Awino & Agolla, 2008 ). Kumar and Jejurkar (2005) finalized that academic factors are the strong reason for triggering a higher stress level among university students. Other reasons are time management skills, financial matters, personal goals, social behavior, and academic support, besides high expectations of parents, complex curriculum, unsuitable timings, unbalanced student-teacher relationship, the classroom’s physical environment, strict rules of discipline, overload of complex assignments, the unconcerned attitude of teachers are also the main causes ( Masih & Gulrez, 2006 ; Agustina et al., 2021 ).

Another approach to access relationships among occupational stress, academic achievement, and time management is another variable. It is about parental involvement role in achieving academic scores for their children. The study accessed 150 students of both genders from 9th grade. The research was conducted on four schools through random sampling. All of the respondents completed questionnaires for data collection of the study. The survey results revealed parental involvement had affirmative and encouraging effect on their children’s educational records. Furthermore, findings suggested a significant relationship between variables; parental involvement in their kids’ studies and level of academic performance of kids ( Castro et al., 2015 ).

Another study by Shute et al. (2011) have conducted concerning access, to what extent does quality of school and parental involvement play a role. The research examined the affiliation between parental connection in their children’s school activities and quality schools. No doubt that the transition for young adolescents from middle to high school is stressful and overwhelming. Because it is the developmental phase that accompanies many cognitive, physical, psychological, and social changes in children. Secondary school students come up with contextual modifications as well as personal changes during the transition period. Not only is it a confusing time for children about families as well. The environment of secondary school learning may be more complicated than the previous level. The study concluded that as the expectation for good academic records increases, students face difficulty maintaining their higher academic achievement level and improving their educational behavior ( Madigan & Curran, 2021 ). Also, the changes can grow the development phase concurrently.

This study is quantitative in nature and is conducted to identify if any relationship exists among occupational stress and academic achievement of students enrolled in graduate programs of the universities of the Lahore. The rationale behind employing this method is that it facilitates acceptance or rejection of the hypotheses on the basis of numeric facts, analyzed via statistical procedures ( Clark et al., 2021 ). In this study, cross-sectional surveys were used to gather primary data to assess any association among study’s variables.

The population of this study was students enrolled in graduate program of university of the Lahore who were also working. Due to COVID-19 pandemic it was not possible for the researcher to ascertain the exact number of working students enrolled in universities.

The COVID-19 pandemic created many limitations for researchers and one of them was to contact sample for data collection in face-to-face mode. The researcher also faced many challenges in data collection during the study because of the COVID. Initially the plan was to collect data by simple random sampling but due to COVID it was collected conveniently. The questionnaires were composed using google document and sent to 500 students in the sample universities. 214 questionnaires were received which were used in data analysis. University Management of Technology, University of Education Lahore, University of Lahore, University of Engineering and Technology, University of Home Economics Lahore were among a few universities selected for convenient sampling.

A scale called “The Occupational Stress Scale (OSS)” was developed by House, McMichael, Wells, Kaplan, and Landerman in 1979 ( Sari, Novianty, & Mirza, 2020 ). It measures the frequency with which employees are bothered by stressful occurrences. This measure further contains five subscales that assess the extent of occupational stress due to job responsibilities, quality concerns, role conflict, job vs non-job conflict, and work load rating from 0 to 4 indicating 4 to be a higher stress level.

The reliability of the scale used for research survey was tested after collecting samples from 15 working students, the reliability can be seen in below tables.

Table 1 shows the reliability of the occupational stress scale and shows a reliability of 0.82.

After completing data collection, the responses from google forms were coded and data were entered into excel sheet. Following this the data was analyzed by SPSS version 21. The first part involves description of the characteristics of participants followed by a descriptive statistical presentation summarizing the data with frequencies and percentages of the demographics on the variables. The second part involves detailed description of Description Analysis and to measure the difference of opinion between the demographic on the variables by applying Independent Sample Test and ANOVA. The third part involves the testing of Relationship among occupational stress, time management and Academic Achievement by applying Bivariate Correlation.

Ethical considerations must be infused in the whole process of research and the organizations’ and individuals’ norms should be taken into consideration ( Drolet et al., 2023 ). For this study ethical considerations were taken into account by extending requests for data collection and ensuring anonymity of the respondents. The data gathered was solely for the purpose of analysis and interpretation of results for this study.

Table 2 shows that there was total 214 students participated in the study, out of which 59 (27.4%) were male and 155 (72.4%) females at Universities of Lahore.

Table 8 shows us that out of the total (N = 214) working students, fairly often said that their job requires them to work very hard i.e. physically and mentally (M = 3.03, SD = 1.05). Fairly often also said that their job requires them to work fast (M = 2.89, SD = 1.02), rather often of the working students also have to deal in situations where they have to satisfy too many people (M = 2.63, SD = 1.27) and their jobs leaves them with very little time to get everything done (M = 2.60, SD = 0.97). Rather often working students also shared that they feel they have too much responsibility for the work of others (M = 2.57, SD = 1.15).

The working students also shared their experience that sometimes the amount of thinking they put into their work may also interfere with how well it gets done (M = 2.52, SD = 1.14), they also have to sometimes do or decide things where mistakes could be quite costly (M = 2.47, SD = 1.01). They also shared that they sometimes feel their job tends to interfere with their family life (M = 2.23, SD = 1.29).

They also rarely feel like they do not have enough help or equipment to get the job well done (M = 1.99, SD = 1.26), they also rarely feel that they have to do things that are against their better judgement (M = 1.97, SD = 1.20), among 214 working students rarely are they asked to work overtime when they do not want too (M = 1.97, SD = 1.41), they also rarely think that they would not be able to meet the conflicting demands of the various people that they work with (M = 1.93, SD = 1.17), they also rarely feel they are unable to influence their immediate supervisor’s decisions and actions that will affect them (M = 1.91, SD = 1.16), very rarely they also feel like don’t know what the people they work with are expecting from them (M = 1.62, SD = 1.22), very few of the working students feel like they are trapped in a job that they don’t like and cannot get out of it (M = 1.56, SD = 1.47).

In inferential statistics t-test and ANOVA were used to identify the significant differences among different groups of participants.

Table 9 shows us that there is no significant difference between perceptions of male and female students about occupational stress (t = −1.20, p = 0.231. Both experience similar occupational stress.

Table 10 shows us that there is no significant difference between perceptions of students from public and private institutes about occupational stress (t = −2.18, p = 0.827). Both experience similar occupational stress.

Table 11 identified a significant difference between perceptions of students who are working full time and those who are working part time about occupational stress (t = 3.091, p = 0.003) Full time working students experienced more (M = 34.64, SD = 10.53) occupational stress as compared to the students who work part time (M = 30.61, SD = 6.22).

Table 12 shows us that there is no significant difference between the perceptions of t students studying in various programs of study about occupational stress (F = 2.42, p = 0.06).

Table 13 shows us that there was a negative and statistically insignificant correlation between Occupational Stress and Academic Achievement (r = −0.006, p < 0.928). This has implied that when there is occupational stress, the academic achievement of the student will be poor.

**Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). r = 0.10 - 0.29 small; r = 0.30 - 0.49 medium; r = 0.50 - 1.0 large.

The statistical analysis has revealed following findings:

The findings of this research study showed us that there is no difference by opinion of gender in the level of occupational stress. There was also no difference between students who are studying in public or private universities and how they deal with occupational stress, with respect to working full-time and part-time, the level of occupational stress was different.

Compared to part-time employment, students with full-time jobs manage their time effectively and productively. In terms of coping abilities among different programs of study and their occupational stress, there was a significant difference among BS, Masters, and M. Phil compared to Ph.D. students. The study further showed that students with higher job experience tend to experience less occupational stress than students with less job experience.

This research revealed to us there is a relationship between occupational stress, time management and academic achievement which is negative, confirms first hypothesis and rejecting null hypothesis.

The study’s primary purpose was to determine the relationship between occupational stress and academic achievement in graduate students in the universities of the Lahore. The study used a questionnaire of a scale, OSS to collect data for this research. Statistical software (SPSS 21.0) analyzed data and demographic characteristics. This paper explains different findings and evaluations in this chapter. The demographic shows that 72.4% were females, and 27.6% were male participants in the study. That means the number of female participants was higher than males. In terms of academic achievement, only 11.2% of students were from BS, a comparatively low amount. While 28% of the students owned Master’s degrees. However, most students of nearly 53.3% were from M. Phil, and only 7% were from Ph.D. So, this statistical data represents that a few students achieved the highest degree. At the same time, many students were enrolled in M.Phil.

The results of this study in terms of academic achievement showed that 0.5% of the students scored 2.0 - 2.5 GPA/CGPA. 14% of the students acquired a 2.6 - 2.9 GPA/CGPA, an average result, while 44.9% of the students achieved 3.6 - 4.0, the highest ratio. The result was above average with a higher percentage, which means most students achieved good academic scores.

Furthermore, this study also analyzed the job experience of working students. So, the statistical results showed that 11.2% of the students are doing the job for less than 1 year, and 14% of the students are managing jobs for 1 - 3 years. While most students have job experience of 3 - 5 years, the percentage of students falls around 26.2%. Interestingly, the highest number of students, up to 48.6%, has the most elevated job experience that extended 5 years.

Some students reported that their job through high level of stress has affected their performance on an academic level and negatively impacted their family relationships in some cases. In addition, some of their decisions turned out to be costly. In short, students explained that they had to manage time for their job and could not manage time for family. At this point, this study conducted by Miller supports the results that occupation stress leads to displeasing physiological consequences. It results in making it difficult for students to manage their time and cope up with strains in the environment ( Miller, 2005 ).

The findings of the study present implications for university students. Students experiencing occupational stress and low level of academic achievement should communicate this situation with their teachers. These teachers should arrange counselors as to conduct seminar or workshops to facilitate students with various stress management programs that can undermine occupational stress and improve their academic achievement.

For future research with these variables the combinations and possibilities can be at a larger scale. Mixed method study can be used combining qualitative date with quantitative method to get a better deep insight. This can help in finding students’ perception about occupational stress and how they cope up with their challenges faced at work while ensuring higher academic grades to meet their goals.