CBCI (Business Continuity Certifications) study plan
CBCI · Give each week a clear focus.
8 weeks · About 7 hours per week
Business Continuity Policy and Programme Management
Define business continuity, disaster recovery, crisis management, and incident management, and articulate how they differ in scope and ownership
Sequence the BCM lifecycle stages and map each stage to its outputs
Identify the roles of the programme sponsor, steering group, BC manager, and business unit owners
Draft the purpose, scope, and objectives clauses of a BC policy
Your checkpoint
A one-page lifecycle map linking each BCM stage to at least one tangible output and the accountable role
Business Continuity Policy and Programme Management & Embedding Business Continuity
Build a governance RACI covering policy approval, BIA sign-off, plan maintenance, and exercise sponsorship
Justify a BC programme business case using impact-of-disruption language rather than compliance language
Describe how BIA outputs flow into strategy selection and plan authoring
List at least six mechanisms for embedding BC into normal business operations
Set three programme-level performance indicators with reporting frequency
Your checkpoint
A mock programme charter containing scope, a one-page RACI, and three KPIs with named owners and reporting cadence
Embedding Business Continuity
Design an awareness campaign segmented by audience: executives, line managers, and general staff
Map competency requirements to specific roles and define how competence will be evidenced
Plan a recurring communications and exercise rhythm that keeps BC visible between refreshes
Select culture and engagement metrics that can be measured without heavy tooling
Your checkpoint
A twelve-month embedding calendar showing audience, channel, activity, owner, and success measure for each month
Analysis
Conduct a business impact analysis for two contrasting functions and justify the interviewee set for each
Derive maximum tolerable period of disruption, recovery time objective, and recovery point objective from impact curves
Classify internal and external dependencies and rank them by criticality
Perform a risk assessment linking threats to the functions they most threaten
Your checkpoint
A completed BIA worksheet for two functions with impact ratings over time and a defensible RTO and RPO for each
Analysis & Design
Generate at least four recovery strategy options for one function, including people, process, technology, and supplier dimensions
Score strategy options against cost, recovery capability, and risk, then select and justify one
Define the immediate actions required in the first hour of a disruption
Specify the incident management structure, including escalation triggers and decision authority
Your checkpoint
A strategy selection matrix scoring three or more options against weighted criteria, with a written recommendation
Design & Implementation
Structure a continuity plan using purpose, scope, roles, activation criteria, and recovery procedures
Draft a department-level plan that stays consistent with the enterprise-level plan
Identify the resources and approvals required to move from design into implementation
Sequence implementation activities so that the highest-impact gaps are closed first
Your checkpoint
A complete department-level continuity plan of roughly five pages, cross-referenced to the enterprise plan it supports
Implementation & Validation
Run a tabletop exercise against the plan written in week six
Design an exercise programme covering the main exercise types and the objective each serves
Produce an exercise report that captures observations and assigns corrective actions with owners and dates
Define the plan maintenance and review cycle, including triggers for out-of-cycle revision
Your checkpoint
A post-exercise report containing at least five corrective actions, each with an owner, a due date, and a verification method
Validation & Business Continuity Policy and Programme Management & Embedding Business Continuity
Self-assess the programme against the standard's requirements and record the largest remaining gaps
Complete timed practice questions across all six domains and analyse errors by domain
Revisit the weakest two domains and rewrite the notes that failed to support recall
Consolidate the whole programme into a single revision sheet covering the lifecycle, key definitions, and metric formulas
Your checkpoint
A scored practice set with an error log grouped by domain and a ranked remediation list of the top five gaps
Milestones
Week 2: Explain the full BCM lifecycle aloud, from policy through validation, naming the output of each stage and who owns it, without notes
Week 4: Produce a defensible RTO and RPO for an unfamiliar function given only impact-over-time information and dependency data
Week 6: Hand a colleague a department plan cold and have them identify the activation trigger, the plan owner, and the first three actions without asking a question
Week 8: Score consistently above the pass threshold on timed practice questions across all six domains, with no domain below 60 percent