The study examines how healthcare professionals’ experiential learning unfolds during the crisis period and how it contributes to the building of their resilience. While previous studies analyzed the linkages between learning at work and the resilience of healthcare professionals, we complement these studies by offering insights about experiential learning and its relation to resilience that occurs both on the job – in highly stressful environments – and parallelly outside work, in an intra-professional university setting. We do so by analyzing inductively the diary data that captures the lived experiences of healthcare professionals with the aim of theory building. The analysis allowed us to generate a theoretical model that depicts how experiential learning processes is triggered by the crisis, acting as an enabler of healthcare professionals' resilience: adaptive and emotional one. Our study provides novel insights related to how resilience might be developed in healthcare professionals through an experiential learning process and provides implications as a means of dealing with future crises.

Keywords: Resilience, experiential learning, healthcare professionals, crisis management