Fundamentals of Business Continuity & Operational Resilience Training Course

Every organisation depends on a handful of activities that cannot stop for long without harming customers, revenue, safety or reputation. Regulators, insurers, donors and large clients now ask suppliers and partners to show that they have identified those activities and know how they would keep them running through an outage, a cyber incident, civil unrest or a public health emergency. Many teams, however, are handed responsibility for continuity with no grounding in the terms and methods involved.

The Fundamentals of Business Continuity & Operational Resilience Training Course gives that grounding. It opens with the core concepts and the structure of ISO 22301 and its guidance standard ISO 22313, then works through the business continuity lifecycle in order: understanding the organisation, conducting a business impact analysis, assessing risks to prioritised activities, selecting continuity and recovery strategies, documenting plans and procedures, and exercising them. A final strand explains how operational resilience extends continuity thinking by focusing on the services customers rely on and the level of disruption the organisation can tolerate.

The pace suits people new to the subject. Each concept is followed by a short, guided exercise using a fictional mid-sized organisation, so participants build a complete set of starter documents across the week: a scope statement, an impact analysis worksheet, a risk register extract, a draft plan and a tabletop exercise script they can reuse at work.

On completing the five days, participants will be able to:

• Explain the purpose of business continuity, crisis management, IT disaster recovery and operational resilience, and how they fit together.
• Describe the clauses of ISO 22301 and the business continuity lifecycle at an introductory level.
• Conduct a basic business impact analysis and set RTO, RPO and MTPD values for prioritised activities.
• Identify the resources and dependencies, including suppliers and IT systems, that critical activities rely on.
• Assess threats to prioritised activities using a simple likelihood and impact matrix.
• Select practical continuity strategies for people, premises, technology, information and suppliers.
• Draft a business continuity plan with clear roles, activation criteria and call trees.
• Plan and facilitate a short tabletop exercise and record the lessons learned.

No prior continuity experience is needed. The programme is aimed at staff taking on resilience duties for the first time, such as:

• Newly appointed business continuity coordinators and champions
• Risk, compliance and internal control officers
• Administration, facilities and office managers
• IT support and service desk staff involved in recovery
• Department heads and supervisors asked to own a unit plan
• Health, safety and security officers
• Operations staff in banks, SACCOs, insurers and telecoms
• Programme and operations staff in NGOs and public agencies
• Graduate trainees joining risk or resilience teams

At the close of the week, each participant takes away:

• A completed business impact analysis worksheet for one department or service.
• A glossary of continuity and resilience terms aligned to ISO 22301.
• A starter risk register covering the main threats to prioritised activities.
• A draft continuity plan template with roles, activation steps and contact lists.
• A call tree and initial crisis communication message templates.
• A ready-to-run tabletop exercise scenario with facilitator notes.
• A short list of next steps for introducing continuity planning in their own organisation.

Teaching assumes no previous knowledge and builds confidence step by step through:

• Plain-language explanations of each ISO 22301 concept, supported by simple diagrams
• Guided worksheets that take participants through the BIA and risk assessment one stage at a time
• A fictional organisation used throughout the week, so each document builds on the last
• Small-group drafting of plan sections with facilitator feedback
• A facilitated tabletop exercise on the final day, followed by a structured debrief
• Short quizzes at the end of each day to check understanding

A CPD-accredited Certificate of Completion issued by Vision Reach Global Consultancy is awarded to participants who attend every session and complete the daily worksheets and the closing tabletop exercise.

The certificate records the course title, dates and delivery mode, and the starter documents produced during the week form a practical portfolio to share with a line manager.