Yin noted the requirement for social workers to provide ‘supportive, empowering and strengths-based (resilience building) services’ and asked‘when the workers themselves are burning out … do we provide the same for
them?’. Many researchers have since explored this question, seeking explanations as to how some social workers survive and thrive and others are lost to the profession. The authors of this small exploratory study were interested
in exploring practitioners’ understanding of resilience. A qualitative approach was employed to explore practitioner views about what contributed to their own resilience, augmented by data gathered in interviews with those
providing supervision to students. Findings suggest a conceptual framework incorporating three aspects of resilience: core attributes within the individual,
the practice context and a series of mediating factors. Participant accounts suggested a multifaceted and dynamically balanced awareness of resilience
that highlighted the relational and contextual characteristics of their experience. This article reports one significant theme emerging from the study;namely that supervision and collegial support are recognised as vital in the nurturing of practitioner resilience.