Resilience and adaptability
Resilience, determination and adaptability are all key qualities required by students, future professionals and successful business leaders.
Why is it important?
There is growing evidence to show:
- Resilient people tend to perform better at exams and work
- Resilient people can achieve more in their career
- It’s a key leadership quality
- Resilient people can lead happier and healthier lives
- Resilient people and more productive employees
- It’s a quality that can be learnt
Developing resilience and tenacity is therefore an essential skill. Knowing how to recognise the different stress factors and finding ways to cope with them improves your ability to bounce back after experiencing adversity. It means you will be a happier and more productive employee. Because of this, many employers at the interview stage will ask you questions about how you have coped with stress in the past or how you would deal with a particular hypothetical situation if it ever happened to you. These are common interview questions.
How can I get better at it?
The good news is that it is a skill and like any other skill, it can be taught. To help you build your resilience, we have created a self-test questionnaire and a series of webinar recordings. Together, these cover the key factors involved in resilience, why each element of resilience is so important and how you score in each area.
There is plenty of practical guidance to help you build up your resistance and develop this key business skill.
Complete the self-test questionnaire first as this will enable you to see which particular areas you might need to work on.
- Resilience questionnaire – how resilient are you?
- Resilience – introduction
- Resilience – part 1 - self awareness
- Resilience – part 2 - practising positivity
- Resilience – part 3 - taking control
- Resilience – part 4 - building strong connections
How do I demonstrate it in my job applications?
Developing resilience and tenacity is an essential skill you’ll need for the workplace. Knowing how to recognise the different stress factors and coping with them means that you will be a happier and more productive employee. This is why it is often assessed in the recruitment process.
You may find yourself being asked at interview stage some question such as:
- How do you cope with stress?
- How do you cope in difficult situations?
- How would you cope if a particular situation happened?
- How do you manage under pressure?
- Describe a difficult or challenging situation and how you handled it?
- Describe a situation when you have shown resilience?
- Describe a situation when you have had to adapt to change? How did you manage?
Think about these questions ahead of your competency-based applications or interviews. These questions are all asking similar things – so try to come up with a couple of examples in case you are asked more than one of these questions.