When Hurricane Melissa damaged more than 800 educational institutions and impacted more than 250,000 students in Jamaica last October, the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) was ready to respond with a plan that had been tried and proven.

Referencing the examination body’s Regional Disaster and Business Recovery Protocol, which was activated during the COVID-19 pandemic and for major disasters like the 2021 La Soufrière volcanic eruption in St Vincent and the Grenadines and Hurricane Beryl in 2024, CXC’s Director of Corporate Services, Sheree Deslandes told participants at the recent Jamaica Employers’ Federation (JEF) Convention in Kingston that the organisation’s response capacity was not improvised in the crisis but strategically built into the organisation’s operational architecture well before the storm made landfall.

Deslandes’ presentation, titled “Hardwired to Recover: HR, Disruption, and the Architecture of a Modern Caribbean Workforce,” was singled out by conference attendees as one of the convention’s most practical and resonant case studies, which outlined how CXC routinely plans for natural disaster disruptions, especially hurricanes, during its traditional May-June examination period.