Business Continuity Practitioner

This course is aimed at those who will be involved in Business Continuity Management or need to improve business continuity-related skills, such as:

• Business continuity managers/ officers
• Facility managers
• Security managers

Finally, this certificate is intended to be an important career milestone for business continuity professionals, as it constitutes the second level of a complete and extensive Certified Business Continuity Management Officer certification track. Achieving the Business Continuity Practitioner certificate provides students with a solid knowledge to be able to continue with the Business Continuity Management Expert certificate, and advance their career to become a BCMO. Students who already possess intermediate-level business continuity knowledge can decide to start their training with the Expert level of the certification track.

The Business Continuity Practitioner certification exam tests your real-world business continuity management skills.

By passing the BCP certification exam and earning a SECO-Business Continuity Practitioner (S-BCP) certificate, you demonstrate your ability to

• Perform threat and vulnerability analyses to identify threats to your organisation;
• Perform business impact analyses to identify critical business functions, processes and resources;
• Prioritise threats and identify appropriate continuity measures;
• Establish maximum tolerable downtime (MTPD) and recovery time objective (RTO) for your processes;
• Draft and implement a business continuity plan;
• Determine key performance indicators for your business continuity plan;
• Draw up and implement an emergency response plan in line with the applicable legal and regulatory requirements;
• Understand the fundamental principles of crisis management planning and internal and external crisis communications;
• Identify roles, responsibilities, competencies and key performance indicators for the internal crisis organisation;
• Identify recovery activities and priorities, and draw up a continuity of operations plan to ensure the availability of critical personnel and resources;

Identify business continuity training and exercise needs, draft and plan BCM exercises, and determine key performance indicators for BCM testing.

• The usefulness, necessity and purpose of a BKA
• Preparing a BKA and BKA reports
• How does your organization view threats and vulnerabilities in general?
• The difference between a quantitative and qualitative assessment of threats and vulnerabilities
• How can threats and vulnerabilities be made manageable?

• The usefulness, necessity and purpose of a BIA
• Existing methods for performing a BIA and drawing up a subsequent damage assessment
• Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPD), Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
• The types of consequential damage and determining a consequential damage picture
• Which disciplines are required for the implementation of a BIA?
• Preparing BIA reports

• What is Crisis Management?
• The characteristics of a crisis
• The difference between an incident and a crisis
• What is the use and necessity of crisis communication?
• The difference between image and reputation
• Drawing up a crisis management plan
• The composition of the crisis organization
• The role of social media in times of crisis
• Drawing up a Crisis Stakeholdermap
• The role of BHV in crisis management

• From company self-protection to company emergency response (BHV)
• History and exploration of first aid for incidents
• What requirements are set for the emergency response team?
• Setting up an emergency response organization
• Emergency Response from the Government

• What is a COOP and what is it for?
• The student can name the plans within the COOP
• The formulation and basic requirements of a recovery plan
• The different types of recovery strategies and associated quality features
• The importance of backup and recovery of digital and non-digital data; the need for external storage
• The translation of a process into underlying information systems and the implementation of remedial measures
• The importance and composition of a recovery organization

SECO-Business Continuity Foundation (S-BCF) certificate or equivalent is recommended.