Jamaican Employers Federation lauds CXC’s regional disaster and business recovery protocol 

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. 

Within weeks of Melissa’s passage, CXC extended a package of humanitarian examination concessions to protect access to the January and May-June 2026 Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) and Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations for students in the hardest-hit parishes. Working with Jamaica’s Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, CXC offered refunds for candidates who did not feel ready to sit their examinations, as well as late registration without penalty. Modifications were also made to the School-Based Assessment (SBA) requirements and submission deadline. 

“The agile resilience demonstrated by CXC for our children is inspiring”, said Training Consultant Tishauna Mullings, who asked the CXC senior executive to explain the organisational structures driving CXC’s Disaster and Business Recovery Protocol impacting students across the region. In response, Deslandes pointed out the critical role played by CXC’s Human Resource function as architect, anchor and activator, as a regional body operating in an era of climate risk, digital disruption and rising stakeholder expectations. 

“Is your HR function built for the storm you haven’t seen yet?”, she challenged, “At CXC, we are restructuring roles and reporting lines, modernising HR systems and workflows, and deliberately embedding a results-focused, recovery-ready organisational culture”, added Deslandes. She argued that the productivity dividend of structural HR transformation is not only for internal operational efficiency, but for CXC’s candidates and Ministries of Education across the region, and the employers, who ultimately receive certified school leavers into the workforce. 

“By design, HR-led transformational work is unfinished. It is a process of purposeful building and rebuilding, and a continuous discipline, where the HR function must be treated as not just support services, but as a strategic edge for productivity and resilience in our multigenerational Caribbean workforces”, said Deslandes.

CXC’s presentation on disaster resilience at the Jamaica Employers’ Federation Convention came at a time when public and private sector organisations are actively looking at working models in support of the post-Hurricane Melissa recovery efforts and in preparation for the next shock.

JEF, Jamaica’s sole employers’ representative body and a voice at the International Labour Organization, has itself made workforce resilience in the wake of Hurricane Melissa a central theme of its current programming, encouraging Jamaican employers to invest in skills development, workplace wellness and disaster-resilient operations.