Senior Business Continuity Specialist

About the role

The Senior Business Continuity Specialist will lead the university’s business continuity program, ensuring critical functions can withstand and recover from disruptive incidents. This role involves managing impact analyses, continuity planning, testing, and advising senior stakeholders on resilience strategies.

Key responsibilities

• Manage day‑to‑day operations and continuous improvement of the business continuity program, keeping frameworks and documentation current.
• Lead Business Impact Analyses to identify critical functions, assess disruption consequences, and set recovery priorities and objectives.
• Map operational dependencies and challenge recovery assumptions to ensure realistic objectives.
• Develop, maintain, and review the institutional business continuity plan and standardized playbooks.
• Facilitate workshops with service owners and department heads to validate BIAs, continuity plans, and playbooks.
• Design and lead annual continuity exercises, coordinate testing, document outcomes, and drive remediation actions.
• Provide specialist advice on continuity risks for new projects, organizational changes, and third‑party dependencies.
• Support incident response, coordinate recovery activities, and conduct post‑incident reviews.
• Prepare regular reports on continuity posture, gaps, and progress for governance committees.

Required profile

• At least 7 years of professional experience in business continuity, operational resilience, or disaster recovery.
• Proven track record leading business impact analyses and developing continuity plans and playbooks.
• Experience designing and evaluating continuity exercises and driving corrective actions.
• Strong advisory skills with senior stakeholders and service owners.
• Working knowledge of ISO 22301 and UAE NCEMA continuity requirements.

Required skills

• Business Impact Analysis (BIA) methodology
• Business continuity planning and playbook development
• Continuity testing and exercise design
• ISO 22301 standards
• UAE NCEMA regulatory requirements