Contemporary labour markets and welfare systems are increasingly shaped by rapid economic, technological, and social change, also overlapping crises that continuously transform professional practice. The resilience of helping professionals has become a critical issue, particularly in terms of their ability to adapt to changing demands while maintaining professional competence and well-being. Resilience is often framed as an individual capacity to cope with uncertainty; however, such an approach risks overlooking the role of education, organisational support, and institutional frameworks. There is relatively little research on the promotion of students of helping professions’ vicarious resiliency   as a relatively  innovative concept in the curriculum of higher education which appears to hold varying meanings. This contribution adopts a reflexive perspective on the preparation of helping professionals, focusing on how training and professional development can strengthen their capacity to respond to contemporary challenges in a sustainable and structurally supported manner.

Many helping professions’ professional practice in the field (social work, nursing, doctors, educators etc.) is fundamentally relational, with the creation of   value-based, supportive, growth-oriented, and healing relationships constituting its central task. They routinely deal with service users who are in vulnerable life situations and disclose traumatic experiences. A key complexity of professions grounded in relational work lies in the fact that harmful experiences are not always immediately visible or explicitly articulated. In many cases, helping professionals are exposed to the same or similar circumstances as the individuals they support, which blurs the boundary between professional and personal experience. This shared exposure makes it particularly challenging to recognise, reflect on, and address the cumulative impact of such experiences, while simultaneously sustaining professional functioning and well-being. Because of the nature of their work, students who study to become professionals working with people in vulnerable life situations need assistance in the development of effective coping strategies. Because challenges such as isolation, exposure to adversity, and burnout often arise through close and sustained engagement with those receiving support, it is essential for future helping professionals to develop resilience and sustainable self-care strategies. The risk for compassion fatigue can be argued to be relatively high when one is still learning a new profession as a student, and during the first years of practice, when the tools and techniques are still relatively new and possibly just developing.  For this reason it is important to enlarge   the curriculum of higher education with   innovative concepts such as vicarious resiliency.

This paper presents a joint research initiative integrating two complementary research trajectories. The first trajectory builds on our previous continuing research conducted at Vytautas Magnus University and the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, which substantiates the importance of interprofessional collaboration between social workers and other helping professionals in creating and sustaining a person’s supportive social environment (Bruneviciute et al., 2007; Veckiene & Eidukeviciute, 2009; Bruneviciute, Veckiene et al., 2011). These studies highlight that complex social problems require coordinated professional responses that extend beyond individual disciplinary boundaries.

The second research trajectory focuses on strengthening professional resilience within the contemporary labour market, particularly when working with highly complex and vulnerable client groups (Pirskanen, Eidukeviciute, Daugeliene, 2025). This line of inquiry explores how professionals can maintain emotional sustainability, professional effectiveness, and ethical sensitivity while simultaneously mobilising external resources available in the broader social, organisational, and community environment.

By integrating these two perspectives, the joint research aims to analyse how interprofessional collaboration and external resource utilisation contribute to resilience-building among helping professionals. The study emphasises the dynamic interaction between individual professional capacities, organisational contexts, and intersectoral cooperation, proposing a holistic framework for supporting professionals facing increasing demands and structural pressures in modern social service systems

Our aim is to investigate existing international research literature on social workers’ vicarious resiliency by using theory-driven, integrative meta-analysis, and outline the guidelines to implement the innovative concept of vicarious resiliency in the curriculum of higher education. We use theory-driven meta-analysis in our study. Although our focus of the meta-analysis is on social workers and social work students, the study has applicability in many fields in which future professionals work with service users. Our research questions for meta-analysis are: 1) What skills and knowledge are needed to become vicariously resilient professionals? 2) What risks can be recognized dealing with emphatic engagement with traumatic experiences and materials of clients? This study is based on a scoping review aimed at mapping existing research on vicarious resilience across different professional fields. Metadata were collected from four databases: ProQuest, Scopus, EBSCOhost, and Google Scholar. The review included research-based quantitative and qualitative articles published in international peer-reviewed journals and written in English. The search was conducted using the terms “vicarious resilience” and “vicarious resiliency.” The selected studies were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The presentation introduces and discusses the preliminary findings of the review.

We argue that promoting the well-being of helping professionals and future professionals requires systematic value-based knowledge of best practices for strengthening resilience and self-care. While resilience is often conceptualised as an individual capacity, this contribution emphasises that inner resilience alone is insufficient. Organisational structures, professional environments, and external forms of support play a crucial role in enabling sustainable resilience among helping professionals. Particular attention is given to the concept of vicarious resilience and to the question of how professionals’ personal experiences of trauma may influence their capacity to develop resilience through relational work with others. Based on the preliminary findings of a scoping review, the presentation outlines practice-oriented recommendations aimed at fostering vicarious resilience in education, organisational settings, and professional practice. In particular, fostering vicarious resilience among students and future professionals poses significant challenges, as it requires the capacity to reflect on others’ experiences of adversity and to recognise relational sources of resilience—processes that are not easily supported within existing training structures. By shifting the analytical focus away from individualised responsibility and towards organisational, educational, and structural conditions, this contribution highlights the need for innovative approaches within social and educational systems that enable sustainable resilience rather than reinforcing narratives of individual failure. Qualitative research highlights vicarious resilience as encompassing changes in professional goals and priorities, increased hope and self-care, strengthened personal resilience and perspective, heightened awareness of power and privilege, and an enhanced capacity to engage with trauma narratives, while emphasising that professional and personal boundary-setting, collaborative relationships, and a strengths-based approach constitute essential elements of professional and innovative training focused not only on knowledge acquisition but also on the development of personal competencies.

Brunevičiūtė, R., Braždžionytė, J., Gudaitytė, D.,Večkienė, N. P. (2007). The Influence of Educational Research on Changes in the Content of Studies: a Comparative Study of the Curricula of Medicine and Social Work. Genth. Brunevičiūtė, R., Večkienė, N. P. ir kt. (2011). Practical preconditions for the development of the Interdisciplinary collaboration competence in healthcare. Santalka: filolologija, Edukologija, Nr. 2, p. 132–140. Vilnius: Technika. Edelkott, N., Engstrom, D. W., Hernandez-Wolfe, P., & Gangsei, D. (2016). Vicarious resilience: Complexities and variations. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 86(6), 713. Engstrom, D., Hernandez, P., & Gangsei, D. (2008). Vicarious resilience: A qualitative investigation into its description. Traumatology, 14, 13–2 Hernández, P.; Gangsei, D.; Engstrom, D. (2007). Vicarious Resilience: A New Concept in Work With Those Who Survive Trauma. Family Process, 46 (2), 229–241. McGlinchey, D., & Killian, K. D. (2024). Helping Others While Helping Yourself: Vicarious Resilience in Victim Service Workers With and Without Experiences of Victimization. Journal of Social Service Research, 1-8. Méndez-Fernández, A. B., Aguiar-Fernández, F. J., Lombardero-Posada, X., Murcia-Alvarez, E., & González-Fernández, A. (2022). Vicariously resilient or traumatised social workers: Exploring some risk and protective factors. The British Journal of Social Work, 52(2), 1089-1109 Puvimanasinghe, T., Denson, L. A., Augoustinos, M., & Somasundaram, D. (2015). Vicarious resilience and vicarious traumatisation: Experiences of working with refugees and asylum seekers in South Australia. Transcultural psychiatry, 52(6), 743-765. Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). "Posttraumatic growth: conceptual foundations and empirical evidence". Psychological inquiry, 15(1), 1-18. Tsesmelis Piccolino, Sophia (2022) Vicarious resilience: traversing the path from client to clinician through a search for meaning. Social Work in Health Care 2022, VOL. 61, NOS. 6–8, 468–482 Večkienė, N., Eidukevičiūtė, J. (2009). Tutoriaus ir mentoriaus funkcijos socialinio darbo studentų mokomosios praktikos procese. Profesinis rengimas: tyrimai ir realijos, Nr. 17, p. 204–228. Vrklevski, L. P., & Franklin, J. (2008). Vicarious trauma: The impact on solicitors of exposure to traumatic material. Traumatology, 14(1), 106-118. Weiss-Dagan, S., Ben-Porat, A., & Itzhaky, H. (2022). Secondary traumatic stress and vicarious post-traumatic growth among social workers who have worked with abused children. Journal of social work, 22(1), 170-187. Staab, P. (2024). Markets and power in digital capitalism. Vančová, V., Halamová, J., & Šoková, B. (2026). Compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue among teachers: Mixed study. Teaching and Teacher Education, 172.