Example Career: Business Continuity Planners

Career Description

Develop, maintain, or implement business continuity and disaster recovery strategies and solutions, including risk assessments, business impact analyses, strategy selection, and documentation of business continuity and disaster recovery procedures. Plan, conduct, and debrief regular mock-disaster exercises to test the adequacy of existing plans and strategies, updating procedures and plans regularly. Act as a coordinator for continuity efforts after a disruption event.

What Job Titles Business Continuity Planners Might Have

• Business Continuity Analyst
• Business Continuity and Crisis Management Director
• Business Continuity Coordinator
• Business Continuity Manager

What Business Continuity Planners Do

• Develop disaster recovery plans for physical locations with critical assets, such as data centers.
• Test documented disaster recovery strategies and plans.
• Analyze impact on, and risk to, essential business functions or information systems to identify acceptable recovery time periods and resource requirements.
• Develop emergency management plans for recovery decision making and communications, continuity of critical departmental processes, or temporary shut-down of non-critical departments to ensure continuity of operation and governance.
• Review existing disaster recovery, crisis management, or business continuity plans.
• Establish, maintain, or test call trees to ensure appropriate communication during disaster.
• Interpret government regulations and applicable codes to ensure compliance.
• Conduct or oversee contingency plan integration and operation.
• Write reports to summarize testing activities, including descriptions of goals, planning, scheduling, execution, results, analysis, conclusions, and recommendations.
• Identify opportunities for strategic improvement or mitigation of business interruption and other risks caused by business, regulatory, or industry-specific change initiatives.
• Create business continuity and disaster recovery budgets.
• Create or administer training and awareness presentations or materials.
• Maintain and update organization information technology applications and network systems blueprints.
• Conduct or oversee collection of corporate intelligence to avoid fraud, financial crime, cyber-attack, terrorism, and infrastructure failure.
• Recommend or implement methods to monitor, evaluate, or enable resolution of safety, operations, or compliance interruptions.
• Analyze corporate intelligence data to identify trends, patterns, or warnings indicating threats to security of people, assets, information, or infrastructure.
• Design or implement products and services to mitigate risk or facilitate use of technology-based tools and methods.
• Prepare reports summarizing operational results, financial performance, or accomplishments of specified objectives, goals, or plans.
• Create scenarios to reestablish operations from various types of business disruptions.
• Attend professional meetings, read literature, and participate in training or other educational offerings to keep abreast of new developments and technologies related to disaster recovery and business continuity.
• Identify individual or transaction targets to direct intelligence collection.

What Business Continuity Planners Should Be Good At

• Problem Sensitivity - The ability to tell when something is wrong or is likely to go wrong. It does not involve solving the problem, only recognizing there is a problem.
• Deductive Reasoning - The ability to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.
• Inductive Reasoning - The ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events).
• Written Comprehension - The ability to read and understand information and ideas presented in writing.
• Oral Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in speaking so others will understand.
• Written Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in writing so others will understand.
• Fluency of Ideas - The ability to come up with a number of ideas about a topic (the number of ideas is important, not their quality, correctness, or creativity).
• Information Ordering - The ability to arrange things or actions in a certain order or pattern according to a specific rule or set of rules (e.g., patterns of numbers, letters, words, pictures, mathematical operations).
• Speech Clarity - The ability to speak clearly so others can understand you.
• Oral Comprehension - The ability to listen to and understand information and ideas presented through spoken words and sentences.
• Near Vision - The ability to see details at close range (within a few feet of the observer).
• Speech Recognition - The ability to identify and understand the speech of another person.
• Originality - The ability to come up with unusual or clever ideas about a given topic or situation, or to develop creative ways to solve a problem.
• Category Flexibility - The ability to generate or use different sets of rules for combining or grouping things in different ways.
• Flexibility of Closure - The ability to identify or detect a known pattern (a figure, object, word, or sound) that is hidden in other distracting material.

What Business Continuity Planners Should Be Interested In

• Enterprising - Enterprising occupations frequently involve starting up and carrying out projects. These occupations can involve leading people and making many decisions. Sometimes they require risk taking and often deal with business.
• Investigative - Investigative occupations frequently involve working with ideas, and require an extensive amount of thinking. These occupations can involve searching for facts and figuring out problems mentally.

What Business Continuity Planners Need to Learn

• English Language - Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar.
• Administration and Management - Knowledge of business and management principles involved in strategic planning, resource allocation, human resources modeling, leadership technique, production methods, and coordination of people and resources.
• Public Safety and Security - Knowledge of relevant equipment, policies, procedures, and strategies to promote effective local, state, or national security operations for the protection of people, data, property, and institutions.
• Communications and Media - Knowledge of media production, communication, and dissemination techniques and methods. This includes alternative ways to inform and entertain via written, oral, and visual media.
• Customer and Personal Service - Knowledge of principles and processes for providing customer and personal services. This includes customer needs assessment, meeting quality standards for services, and evaluation of customer satisfaction.
• Computers and Electronics - Knowledge of circuit boards, processors, chips, electronic equipment, and computer hardware and software, including applications and programming.
• Law and Government - Knowledge of laws, legal codes, court procedures, precedents, government regulations, executive orders, agency rules, and the democratic political process.
• Education and Training - Knowledge of principles and methods for curriculum and training design, teaching and instruction for individuals and groups, and the measurement of training effects.
• Telecommunications - Knowledge of transmission, broadcasting, switching, control, and operation of telecommunications systems.