Business continuity management postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in business continuity started with a flooded high street and a set of hand-written signs. During my second undergraduate year, heavy rain overwhelmed the drains in my home town and around twenty businesses closed for several days. What struck me was not the water but the difference in recovery: a bakery reopened within two days from a relative's kitchen, while a shop three doors along stayed shut for nearly a month waiting on an insurance decision. That contrast became my dissertation. I interviewed eleven traders, asked what they had lost, what they had written down beforehand and who they rang first, and mapped the disruption against the borough's drainage records. My conclusion was unglamorous but useful: the businesses that recovered quickly had relationships and workarounds rather than documents. It taught me that continuity planning lives or dies on how realistic its assumptions are about people.

My Geography degree gave me a good grounding for this field. Hazard and risk modules covered exposure, vulnerability and cascading failure, and quantitative methods gave me working GIS and basic statistics, which I used to produce the flood-extent maps for my dissertation. I also took a module on transport networks that introduced me to single points of failure, an idea I have since seen constantly in practice. I graduated with a 2:1 and my dissertation was my strongest piece of work, largely because the fieldwork forced me to defend my methods to people whose livelihoods I was writing about.

Since graduating I have worked full time as a duty supervisor at a regional distribution depot. It is not a resilience role, but it is an education in operational disruption. I run shift handovers, keep the incident log and coordinate with drivers when routes are blocked or a chiller unit fails. Two winters ago a power cut took out our loading bay lighting and gates for most of a night shift; we moved to manual gate release and prioritised chilled loads, but the sequence was decided on the spot by people with long memories rather than by any written procedure. Afterwards I reread our business continuity plan and found it assumed a level of IT access we did not have. I wrote up what we had actually done, in the order we had done it, and gave it to my manager; parts of it were added to the shift folder. That small piece of work convinced me that I wanted to do this properly rather than informally.

With no training budget available to me, I have built my knowledge in low-cost ways. I completed an inexpensive online short course on risk assessment, read summaries of the ISO 22301 approach to management systems, and worked through Deyle and others' writing on hazard mitigation that I first met as an undergraduate. I have also been reading about supply chain resilience and the tension between efficiency and buffer stock, which is very visible in my own workplace. Alongside this I marshal a monthly community running event, where I help with the route briefing and the wet-weather plan, and I have learnt how quickly a simple contingency collapses if the person holding it is absent.

Postgraduate study is the step I cannot take on my own: structured grounding in business impact analysis, crisis communication, exercising and the governance side of resilience, plus the chance to test my assumptions against other sectors. I am particularly keen to look further at how micro and small businesses, which rarely have formal plans, can be supported by local authorities and larger partners. In the longer term I would like to work as a continuity practitioner in logistics or local government, and I intend to keep the habit of writing down what actually happened rather than what should have.

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