🛡️ We're Hiring: Continuity Planning Manager
📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)
🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time
💼 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior
🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote
About Us
We are an organization committed to strengthening business continuity, operational resilience, preparedness, and recovery capabilities across a complex and interconnected business environment.
Our distributed teams collaborate across Business Continuity, Enterprise Risk, Crisis Management, Disaster Recovery, IT, Cybersecurity, Operations, Facilities, Security, HSE, Finance, Procurement, Supply Chain, Human Resources, Legal, Compliance, Communications, Technology, Business Units, Consultants, Suppliers, and Executive Leadership to protect critical operations, people, assets, customers, information, and business value.
The Role
We are seeking an experienced Continuity Planning Manager to lead the development, implementation, maintenance, testing, and continuous improvement of business continuity plans across the organization.
The ideal candidate will establish structured continuity-planning processes, conduct Business Impact Analyses (BIAs), assess operational dependencies and disruption risks, develop recovery strategies, coordinate continuity plans across business functions, and ensure the organization is prepared to respond to and recover from disruptive events.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and implement the organization's business continuity planning framework, methodology, policies, standards, procedures, templates, and governance model.
- Establish a structured enterprise-wide continuity planning lifecycle covering risk assessment, Business Impact Analysis, strategy development, plan development, testing, maintenance, and continuous improvement.
- Develop annual continuity planning programs, schedules, priorities, milestones, and implementation plans.
- Coordinate continuity planning activities across business units, departments, functions, locations, subsidiaries, and critical operational teams.
- Establish clear continuity-planning roles, responsibilities, ownership, approval processes, escalation mechanisms, and reporting requirements.
- Conduct and coordinate Business Impact Analyses (BIAs) for critical business functions, processes, services, products, and activities.
- Identify critical business processes and determine recovery priorities, dependencies, minimum operating requirements, and acceptable disruption thresholds.
- Establish appropriate Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), Maximum Tolerable Periods of Disruption (MTPDs), and other recovery parameters.
- Identify critical dependencies across people, technology, applications, data, facilities, equipment, suppliers, utilities, transportation, communications, and infrastructure.
- Develop dependency maps and identify single points of failure, concentration risks, critical resource constraints, and recovery bottlenecks.
- Conduct business continuity risk assessments covering operational, technology, cyber, workforce, facility, supply-chain, financial, environmental, geopolitical, regulatory, and other disruption risks.
- Maintain continuity risk registers, risk assessments, mitigation plans, action trackers, and escalation records.
- Work with Enterprise Risk Management to integrate continuity risks into broader organizational risk-management processes.
- Develop practical continuity and recovery strategies for critical business processes and services.
- Evaluate recovery options including alternate work locations, remote working, manual procedures, cross-training, redundant resources, backup facilities, alternate suppliers, inventory buffers, technology recovery, geographic diversification, and other resilience measures.
- Assess the feasibility, cost, effectiveness, implementation requirements, and risk-reduction benefits of proposed continuity strategies.
- Develop and maintain Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) for critical business functions and organizational units.
- Develop department-level continuity plans, functional recovery plans, operational contingency plans, emergency procedures, and supporting playbooks.
- Ensure continuity plans clearly define activation criteria, escalation procedures, decision-making authorities, response responsibilities, recovery priorities, communications, and return-to-normal processes.
- Ensure continuity plans reflect current organizational structures, processes, systems, facilities, suppliers, staffing, technology, and operational dependencies.
- Coordinate with business-function owners to develop, review, approve, and maintain continuity plans.
- Provide guidance, templates, methodologies, and practical support to continuity-plan owners and business continuity coordinators.
- Establish plan-review schedules and ensure continuity plans are reviewed and updated at defined intervals.
- Ensure continuity plans are updated following organizational changes, system implementations, facility changes, supplier changes, incidents, exercises, audits, or other significant events.
- Maintain a centralized repository of approved continuity plans, recovery procedures, contact lists, BIAs, risk assessments, exercise results, and supporting documentation.
Ideal Candidate
The successful candidate should have experience in business continuity, continuity planning, operational resilience, crisis management, disaster recovery, emergency management, enterprise risk management, or related fields.
Experience working with multinational corporations, financial institutions, technology companies, energy organizations, infrastructure, construction, manufacturing, logistics, retail, healthcare, government organizations, or other complex operational environments is highly advantageous.
The candidate should demonstrate:
- Strong understanding of business continuity management, continuity planning, operational resilience, crisis preparedness, and recovery planning.
- Proven experience developing, implementing, maintaining, and testing business continuity plans.
- Strong experience conducting Business Impact Analyses (BIAs) and identifying critical processes, dependencies, recovery priorities, and resource requirements.
- Strong understanding of RTOs, RPOs, MTPDs, recovery priorities, minimum operating requirements, and continuity strategies.
- Experience developing department-level, functional, enterprise-wide, or location-specific continuity plans.
- Strong understanding of operational, technology, cyber, workforce, facility, supplier, infrastructure, financial, environmental, and regulatory disruption risks.
- Experience designing and facilitating tabletop exercises, simulations, drills, disaster-recovery tests, and continuity exercises.
- Experience managing exercise findings, corrective actions, remediation plans, and continuous-improvement programs.
- Strong understanding of IT disaster recovery and the relationship between business continuity and technology recovery.
- Experience working with IT, Cybersecurity, Technology, Facilities, Security, HSE, HR, Finance, Procurement, Supply Chain, Legal, Communications, Risk, and business-unit leadership.
- Strong understanding of third-party and supplier continuity, including critical supplier identification, resilience assessments, alternative sourcing, and recovery planning.
- Experience developing workforce continuity, alternate-site, remote-working, relocation, and facility-recovery strategies.
- Strong crisis-management awareness and ability to support structured response and recovery during disruptive events.
- Experience developing continuity KPIs, dashboards, maturity assessments, risk reports, and executive presentations.
- Strong understanding of continuity governance, documentation control, audit requirements, evidence management, and plan maintenance.
- Experience with business continuity management systems, GRC platforms, crisis-management tools, mass-notification systems, risk platforms, or related technologies.
- Strong project-management capabilities with experience coordinating multiple business units, locations, stakeholders, plans, exercises, and deadlines.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to convert operational risks and dependencies into practical continuity strategies.
- Strong attention to detail and ability to manage large volumes of plans, data, documentation, actions, and stakeholder inputs.
- Strong stakeholder-management, facilitation, communication, presentation, negotiation, and influencing skills.
- Strong Microsoft Office skills, particularly Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
- Familiarity with recognized business continuity, operational resilience, disaster recovery, risk management, or resilience frameworks is highly advantageous.
- Understanding of climate-related physical risks and their implications for continuity and operational resilience is advantageous.
- Ability to balance continuity requirements with operational practicality, financial constraints, customer needs, technology capabilities, regulatory obligations, and business priorities.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills in English; Arabic is highly advantageous for UAE and broader GCC business, government, emergency-management, and regulatory environments.
- Ability to work independently in a fully remote and internationally distributed environment.
- Willingness and ability to participate in exercises, incident-response activities, and urgent continuity planning when required.
- High level of integrity, accountability, discretion, organization, analytical rigor, and sound judgment.
- Strong planning-oriented, risk-aware, detail-focused, collaborative, preparedness-driven, and resilience-minded mindset.