Developing Social Work Professional Identity Resilience: Seven Protective Factors

Abstract

ABSTRACT The human service context is a complex space for social workers and service users, bringing both challenges and opportunities. The ability to navigate challenges is essential for social workers to appropriately support clients and maintain longevity in human service work. Practitioners are expected to possess resilience to mitigate these challenges. Social workers are familiar with the concept of resilience in relation to work with clients. However, it is important they develop their own resilience to withstand industry pressure and build professional identity resilience (PIR). In this article, we drew on an Australian grounded theory PhD study that explored the experience of professional identity development (PID) for newly graduated social workers, specifically the challenges they faced in relation to PID and the link between professional identity and resilience. PIR emerged as a key concept in the process of forming a social work professional identity and seven protective factors were identified that support the development of PIR. IMPLICATIONS Developing professional identity resilience can assist students and graduates to counter challenging experiences of being a social worker. Professional identity resilience plays an important role in the development and ongoing maintenance of professional identity and as such is essential knowledge for social work educators, professional associations, social work students and graduates.