John Welsh

With nearly twenty years delivering simulation solutions across multiple industries including defence, healthcare, emergency services and even cultural heritage, John Welsh has a reasonable idea of how simulation technologies are used and what they can achieve. Serving with the British Army for 10 years provided early context for his later support to the Australian Defence Force. Several years working in the video games industry taught him technology. And teaching leadership and teambuilding were instrumental to his knowledge of training. Bringing this expertise together John has worked for and with startups, small to medium enterprises, and big primes nationally and internationally. He established the Australasian Simulation Congress Serious Games Showcase and Challenge to ensure the region’s talents were recognised on an international stage and has been an advocate for making simulation systems mainstream. Recently brought in to operationalise the North Queensland Simulation Park, NQ SPARK, he tirelessly maintains that context is everything and it’s not what simulation is, but what you do with it that counts. Despite his many years of using gaming technologies, he remains a rubbish gamer.