Top 12 Business Continuity Manager Skills to Put on Your Resume
In today’s jumbled, high-velocity risk landscape, a Business Continuity Manager needs a sharp toolkit to keep the organization resilient and recover fast when things go sideways. The skills below anchor planning, response, and recovery so operations don’t just survive a disruption—they come back smarter and stronger.
Business Continuity Manager Skills
- Risk Assessment
- Disaster Recovery
- Business Impact Analysis
- Crisis Management
- ISO 22301
- Incident Command System
- Continuity Planning
- Emergency Response
- ITIL Framework
- Cloud Computing
- Cybersecurity Measures
- Regulatory Compliance
1. Risk Assessment
Risk assessment is the disciplined hunt for threats and weaknesses that could knock critical operations off balance, paired with practical actions to reduce likelihood and impact.
Why It's Important
It spotlights what could harm the organization before it does, guiding targeted controls, smart investments, and faster recovery when the unexpected hits.
How to Improve Risk Assessment Skills
Map risks broadly: Scan strategic, operational, cyber, third-party, compliance, physical, and environmental threats. Use both data and frontline insights.
Quantify what matters: Score likelihood and impact. Tie scenarios to downtime, safety, legal exposure, and financial loss. Prioritize ruthlessly.
Define controls: Prevent where you can, detect quickly where you can’t, and build clear fallback actions. Assign owners and deadlines.
Watch and adapt: Track indicators, incidents, and near misses. Refresh assumptions often—risks move.
Embed awareness: Train teams to spot and escalate risk early. Clear playbooks beat guesswork.
How to Display Risk Assessment Skills on Your Resume
2. Disaster Recovery
Disaster Recovery (DR) zeroes in on rapidly restoring IT systems, data, and connectivity after disruption so the business keeps moving.
Why It's Important
It trims downtime, protects revenue and reputation, and anchors business continuity when technology falters or fails.
How to Improve Disaster Recovery Skills
Set recovery targets: Define RTOs and RPOs per service. Align to business tolerance, not guesswork.
Build layered backups: Use immutable, offline, and geographically separate copies. Test restores, not just backups.
Design for failure: Automate failover, add redundancy, and segment networks. Assume a component will break—because it will.
Test often: Run tabletop, technical, and full failover exercises. Fix gaps fast.
Harden the supply chain: Validate vendor DR capabilities and dependencies. Put it in contracts and verify.
Continuously improve: Use after-action reviews to refine runbooks, tooling, and roles.
How to Display Disaster Recovery Skills on Your Resume
3. Business Impact Analysis
Business Impact Analysis (BIA) pinpoints which processes matter most, how long you can afford them to be down, and what you need to keep them alive.
Why It's Important
It drives priorities. Without it, continuity plans sprawl and miss the mark. With it, resources hit the bullseye.
How to Improve Business Impact Analysis Skills
Catalog critical processes: Tie each to products, SLAs, revenue, safety, and obligations.
Trace dependencies: People, tech, data, facilities, suppliers, and upstream services. Map single points of failure.
Quantify thresholds: Set MAOs/MTPDs, RTOs, and RPOs. Confirm with process owners and finance.
Validate with leadership: Pressure-test assumptions. Agree on what gets saved first when time is short.
Refresh regularly: Update when products, org structure, or suppliers change—no shelfware.
Use tooling wisely: Simple spreadsheets work; dedicated BCM platforms add consistency and reporting at scale.
How to Display Business Impact Analysis Skills on Your Resume
4. Crisis Management
Crisis Management is the choreography of preparation, fast decision-making, and recovery when disruption hits hard.
Why It's Important
It protects people, stabilizes operations, preserves reputation, and keeps stakeholders informed when uncertainty spikes.
How to Improve Crisis Management Skills
Build a crisp plan: Clear triggers, roles, authorities, and escalation paths. Keep it short enough to use under stress.
Train and drill: Simulations expose friction. Rotate scenarios: cyber, facility outage, supplier collapse, safety events.
Communicate deliberately: One source of truth, pre-approved templates, and redundant channels. Speed and candor matter.
Coordinate outward: Know your contacts in emergency services, regulators, landlords, and key vendors before you need them.
Learn out loud: After-action reviews, quick fixes, then structural improvements. Close the loop.
How to Display Crisis Management Skills on Your Resume
5. ISO 22301
ISO 22301 (Business Continuity Management Systems) lays out a disciplined framework to plan, implement, operate, monitor, and continually improve continuity capabilities.
Why It's Important
It brings structure, evidence, and repeatability—turning good intentions into auditable, working resilience.
How to Improve ISO 22301 Skills
Run a gap analysis: Compare current practices to ISO 22301:2019 requirements. Prioritize remediations.
Raise awareness: Train roles across the business—owners, responders, and leadership—so the BCMS isn’t a silo.
Exercise the plans: Validate strategies via drills and technical tests. Document outcomes and actions.
Audit and review: Internal audits feed into management review. Track nonconformities to closure.
Measure what matters: Define KPIs for readiness, testing cadence, recovery performance, and corrective action speed.
Engage suppliers: Extend requirements into contracts. Test critical third parties.
How to Display ISO 22301 Skills on Your Resume
6. Incident Command System
The Incident Command System (ICS) is a standardized, all-hazards structure that clarifies roles, unifies communication, and coordinates resources during an incident.
Why It's Important
It cuts confusion. Clear command, common language, and scalable organization lead to faster stabilization and safer operations.
How to Improve Incident Command System Skills
Define roles early: Incident Commander, Public Information, Operations, Planning, Logistics, Finance—name backups, too.
Train to the structure: Short, frequent exercises beat annual marathons. Rotate staff into different ICS roles.
Standardize action plans: Use concise Incident Action Plans with objectives, resources, and comms plans.
Harden communications: Redundant channels, contact trees, and status boards. Practice when systems are degraded.
After-action rigor: Capture lessons, assign fixes, verify completion. Institutional memory trumps heroics.
How to Display Incident Command System Skills on Your Resume
7. Continuity Planning
Continuity Planning builds pragmatic strategies and playbooks so essential functions continue during and after disruption.
Why It's Important
It turns chaos into choreography—keeping critical services alive, customers supported, and obligations met.
How to Improve Continuity Planning Skills
Start with the BIA: Focus plans on truly critical processes and their dependencies.
Choose workable strategies: Alternate sites, remote work, manual workarounds, inventory buffers, vendor backups. Avoid wishful thinking.
Write clear runbooks: Step-by-step actions, contacts, and decision criteria. Short, specific, and accessible.
Exercise scenarios: Test manual work, remote access, alternate suppliers, and cross-training.
Keep it current: Update plans when org charts, apps, facilities, or vendors change.
Communicate outward: Employees, customers, and suppliers should know what to expect during a disruption.
How to Display Continuity Planning Skills on Your Resume
8. Emergency Response
Emergency Response is the immediate, safety-first action that protects people, stabilizes the scene, and sets recovery in motion.
Why It's Important
Lives and livelihoods depend on it. Speed, clarity, and coordination make the difference when minutes matter.
How to Improve Emergency Response Skills
Know your hazards: Fire, medical, severe weather, security, utility loss—plan for the local reality.
Train relentlessly: Evacuations, shelter-in-place, medical aid, and communication drills. Include new hires and visitors in protocols.
Equip and maintain: First-aid kits, AEDs, radios, generators, lighting—ready and inspected.
Coordinate locally: Build relationships with emergency services and property management ahead of time.
Debrief and improve: After incidents and drills, tighten procedures and fix equipment gaps quickly.
How to Display Emergency Response Skills on Your Resume
9. ITIL Framework
The ITIL framework (modernized in ITIL 4) provides IT service management practices that dovetail with continuity and recovery, ensuring critical services are designed, delivered, and restored reliably.
Why It's Important
It aligns IT operations with business outcomes, reduces chaos during incidents, and accelerates stable recovery.
How to Improve ITIL Framework Skills
Embed continuity: Bake continuity and DR into service design, change, incident, and problem management.
Strengthen service continuity: Define minimum viable service levels and recovery patterns per service. Document dependencies.
Automate resilience: Use orchestration, infrastructure as code, and monitoring to speed failover and validation.
Practice continual improvement: Measure incident recovery times, post-incident actions, and configuration accuracy.
Grow skills: Cross-train IT and continuity teams on ITIL 4 and BC principles to bridge gaps.
How to Display ITIL Framework Skills on Your Resume
10. Cloud Computing
Cloud computing delivers on-demand infrastructure and services that scale, recover fast, and keep data within reach when the unexpected lands.
Why It's Important
It enables redundancy across regions, rapid restoration, and flexible capacity—core ingredients of operational resilience.
How to Improve Cloud Computing Skills
Design for resilience: Multi-AZ or multi-region architectures, fault isolation, and automated failover.
Protect the data: Encrypt in transit and at rest, use immutable backups, and test restores routinely.
Harden identity: Strong IAM, least privilege, and multi-factor authentication everywhere.
Test recovery: Run game days and chaos experiments to verify recovery paths and latency to failover.
Watch costs and risk: Balance multi-cloud aspirations with complexity. Sometimes multi-region beats multi-cloud.
How to Display Cloud Computing Skills on Your Resume
11. Cybersecurity Measures
Cybersecurity measures are the controls, processes, and behaviors that shield systems and data from attacks—and keep the business running when adversaries try to knock it down.
Why It's Important
Breaches shatter trust, drain cash, and stall operations. Strong cyber hygiene is continuity’s frontline.
How to Improve Cybersecurity Measures Skills
Use a modern framework: Align to NIST CSF 2.0 or similar. Cover identify, protect, detect, respond, recover.
Close the big doors: MFA, endpoint protection, patching discipline, email security, and network segmentation.
Prepare to respond: Incident response plans with roles, legal/regulatory steps, forensic access, and decision paths.
Back up like it matters: Isolated, tested backups that can’t be encrypted by ransomware.
Educate continuously: Phishing resistance, reporting culture, and role-based security training.
Third-party vigilance: Assess vendors, require controls, and track remediation of findings.
How to Display Cybersecurity Measures Skills on Your Resume
12. Regulatory Compliance
Regulatory compliance means aligning continuity and response activities with applicable laws, regulations, and standards across jurisdictions and industries.
Why It's Important
It avoids penalties, sustains stakeholder trust, and ensures the organization can operate—legally and reliably—during turbulence.
How to Improve Regulatory Compliance Skills
Map obligations: Identify applicable rules (e.g., ISO 22301 guidance, NIS2, DORA, HIPAA, SOX, PCI DSS, sector directives, and local requirements).
Integrate into plans: Bake compliance checkpoints into BIA, risk, incident response, and crisis communications.
Document evidence: Policies, exercises, test results, corrective actions, vendor attestations—organized and audit-ready.
Train and test: Role-based training for responders and executives, including disclosure and reporting obligations.
Audit and remediate: Internal reviews and third-party assessments. Track findings to closure with deadlines and owners.
How to Display Regulatory Compliance Skills on Your Resume
