Understanding practitioner resilience

Emerging practitioners face a myriad of challenges as they enter public relations practice for the first time. In addition to developing an understanding of the functions and practices of the discipline, emerging practitioners’ also need to develop their resilience to respond to the challenges inherent in practice contexts. This paper reports on research that explored practitioner’s understanding of the concept of human psychological resilience. This qualitative study investigated how practitioners defined resilience, their understanding of the phenomena, the extent to which they consider themselves as resilient, and why, and the importance of resilience in their everyday practice. Extending Guo and Anderson’s (2018) investigation of the lived experiences of practitioners in enacting resilience, this work responds to Buzzanell (2010) call to explore the construction of resilience in specific contexts, here regional practice settings. Resilience is understood to be a virtue expressed through the ability to adapt positively to significant adversity (Russell, 2015). This work argues that resilience is not only a central virtue to practising public relations but indeed to our daily lives as human beings. There are important reasons in exploring the concept of resilience for emerging practitioners and the impact they have on the development of the profession.