Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
By Vicky Harsant, Nottingham Advantage Award Manager
This insight is part of our career wellbeing series.
Have you ever encountered a situation where things didn’t quite go to plan or where the outcome wasn’t as positive as you had hoped? Have you ever faced a setback or made a mistake?
The answer is probably yes! This happens to us all. What’s important is how you recover and move forward positively.
Resilience is generally understood as the ability to recover from, and adapt to, difficult or challenging situations. Resilience is something that can be built over time, through the development of a range of skills and behaviours including adaptability, self-awareness, problem-solving, self-management, self-efficacy and communication.
You probably recognise, and already possess, some of these as the result of your academic, work, and extracurricular experiences.
Why is resilience important to graduate employers?
Applying for and starting a new job means facing a variety of challenges. Recruitment processes can be hard work, and you may experience rejection.
Once in work, it may take time to adapt to a new environment, and your role or the sector you work in may evolve at pace. Developing behaviours that will help you manage change will be important for your ongoing development.
As such, employers may assess your resilience through the recruitment process. They may ask direct questions about setbacks and how you’ve dealt with them or use situational judgment questions designed to explore how you manage challenging situations. We offer resources on our website to help you with preparing for applications from CVs to interviews and everything in between.
Build your resilience
There are lots of ways to build resilience, and reflection is key.
Think about your academic, work, or extracurricular experiences. Consider a situation that was challenging. What happened? How did you feel? What have you learned? What would you do differently? And, if you can, get some feedback. How did others feel you managed the situation? An objective perspective can help us see a situation differently and offer support.
Get to know your skills and strengths
Building self-awareness is essential. Focus on your unique skills and strengths and how these could help you manage challenging situations in the future. You could try doing a skills audit exercise to assess where you’re at and then use the insight you gain to inform your development goals. Then, look for relevant opportunities for further development.
Use our resources including Profiling for Success, free access for UoN students and graduates, to find out more.
Getting experience
Taking part in volunteering, part-time work, internships, and projects are great ways to develop the skills required for building resilience, from problem-solving and communication, to adaptability and self-management and for confidence building. These experiences will also give you a range of examples to draw on during the recruitment process to evidence resilience.
Find out more about opportunities to gain work experience.
Don’t be afraid to try, and don’t be afraid to fail!
Try to re-frame your thinking to help you to see things differently. At some point we may feel as though we didn’t meet someone else’s (or our own!) expectations, either due to factors out of our control, or because we are still developing the required knowledge or skills.
Don’t put off trying something because you are worried about making a mistake. You won’t have all the answers or get everything right first time. It is important to give things a go and use these experiences to reflect on what happened, what went well, what didn’t go so well, and how you can take this learning forward in the future.
Looking after yourself
Looking after your overall wellbeing is important and can help you to deal with change and challenges throughout your career.
If you want to talk about your career and build your resilience, book an appointment on MyCareer or call into a drop-in.
Posted on Thursday 16th October 2025