About CrisisVR

Jerry Allen

Director and Course Development

Jerry is widely known as an international authority on crisis management, emergency response and recovery. His military background and later careers with IATA and a global disaster management company, has given Jerry the skills, knowledge and experience to assist companies to be prepared for crisis. Jerry has worked extensively for international clients delivering training programmes, complex exercises and plan reviews. He believes that modern e-learning programmes fill the gap in the training market, making key-skill development more accessible to greater numbers. Jerry is a lecturer in Crisis Management at City University, London and a trainer for the UK Government Emergency Planning College.

Dom Bernard

Co-founder and Head of Technical

Dom is one of the brains behind VirtualSpeech, the multi-award-winning professional development training tool. Prior to VirtualSpeech, Dom worked at Jaguar Land Rover in their virtual reality department, working on large scale VR and AR projects. Since then, he founded VirtualSpeech, aimed at providing a more realistic way to practice business and soft skills. The VirtualSpeech app has been downloaded by more than 200,000 people worldwide.

Dr. Louise Elstow

Senior Associate

Louise has a PhD in the construction of scientific information in contamination emergencies, and an MSc degree in Risk, Crisis and Disaster Management. Her academic prowess combines with her 15 years of practical consultancy experience in resilience for multiple private and government organisations. Louise has expertise in planning for and responding to civil emergencies, improving crisis management, crisis communications and business continuity. Her clients as Managing Director of Fynbos Consulting Ltd and her associate assignments with CrisisVR include universities and higher education, the utilities sector, local authorities, healthcare providers, the transport sector and nuclear infrastructure. Most recently and over three months, Louise directly supported a government resilience planning programme in Saudi Arabia.

Andy Spinks

Senior Associate

A dynamic and experienced leader with defence and commercial experience, with particular strengths in airport operations, fuels, and government consultancy. Andy has worked extensively on senior international programmes in Canada, Europe, Middle and Far East. He combines his significant general-officer military experience with the commercial acumen gained with blue-chip industries. Andy joined CrisisVR as a senior associate in 2018 and directly influenced our work with Kansai Airports Group in Japan supporting their crisis planning and management exercises. He is recognised as an all-round leader/manager with gravitas whose determined yet inclusive approach delivers solutions in the most demanding of conditions.

The genesis of CrisisVR –
or Analogue meets Digital

As independent consultants, we trained ‘the old way’. Simply described, it was the traditional menu of training room, students, instructor and some form of visual aids.

And then things became boring.

‘Bullets’ of information and bouncing title slides added to the variety but reduced student interest. Quality suffered.

The other inescapable trend for crisis management training was the pressure of budgets. The cost of centrally assembling students and trainers, often from many different countries was eye-watering. The option for companies was to reduce the number of students or the frequency of training. Quality suffered.

Our response was to think differently about training. Some topics and some groups require the traditional training approach and we still provide this option. But other topics and special teams could benefit from emerging technology to improve quality and increase numbers of trained staff while reducing costs.

We were introduced to VirtualSpeech, a small company delivering high-quality immersive training without either the student or the instructor travelling further than their coffee machine.

VirtualSpeech