Business Continuity Consultant

Most days mix assessment work for clients, plan development workshops, facilitating tabletop exercises, and supporting recovery testing. You'll often work across multiple engagements at different stages — one client building their first BCP, another maturing a program, another responding to a regulatory finding. The variance between engagements shapes the rhythm more than any single methodology does.

What's harder than people expect is getting client commitment to the unglamorous middle of a BC program — plan maintenance, exercise programs, ongoing training. Initial assessments are interesting; year three of program maintenance is harder to sustain. Earning credibility with operational owners who don't want one more form to fill out is often the biggest leverage point, and the methodology (ISO 22301, NIST, FFIEC) is the easy part.

People who tend to thrive here are methodical, comfortable with cross-industry context-switching, and skilled at making continuity discipline feel like enabling work rather than compliance work. The role tends to lead into senior consultant, BC director, or enterprise risk leadership positions. The trade-off is that the work tends to involve a lot of travel and client-facing time, and the slow nature of program-building can test patience.