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Citrus merge with HR Training & Development to expand in the North of England.

After many successful years at our Head Office in Irthlingborough and with several permanent southern locations, the time came to grow and find new facilities. As part of a broader long term growth strategy for the business, the new premises would support our 2017 strategic plan to launch a regional training centre and office in the North of England.  

We had recently won a significant contract with Yorkshire Water, and so the Eastern side of the M62 corridor was a target location for us.  

At the same time, another successful training organisation operating from the Cross Green area of Leeds, HR Training & Development (HRTD), was looking to merge with a more prominent training provider to grow its portfolio, reach and breadth of delivery. And so, an opportunity presented itself for Citrus Group to acquire the company. We were successful in the acquisition and to the significant benefit of both organisations.  

Citrus Training made a substantial investment to improve the office, welfare and classroom facilities, and the practical training areas. Today, a newly constructed confined space training area, a new scaffold tower adjacent to the plant training land, and a purpose-built simulated street works and civils utilities section are housed in our vast training facility, ready to train our nationwide customers.  

Merging HRTD and Citrus 

While the two organisations have merged operationally from the outset, sharing central functions such as finance, IT and marketing, we kept the respective brands and operating systems separate. The rationale was that the HRTD name, formerly the Hewlett and Rand training brands, was well known within the local area and to local employers and customers. We also wanted to wait until we had amalgamated our administrative functions and training delivery teams before formally coming together - ensuring a smooth customer experience and a positive onboarding phase for our team members.  

The time was right to begin the consolidation phase as we settled in. And so, throughout 2021, representatives from Citrus and HRTD ran a project to align our services and operating framework. The aim was to improve our performance, client engagement and customer service levels.  

Months of hard work have taken place behind the scenes to prepare us for the start of 2022, where we are now formally coming together under the Citrus Training brand. This new stage will see us dissolve the HRTD brand during the first half of 2022 in phases to minimise any disruption.

What clients can expect going forward

Due to the volume of training and increase in customer activity in the northern regions, we are confident that this merger will improve working conditions for all our stakeholders and future proof our services for years to come. 

In the first half of 2022, we will relocate to a larger, custom specified training centre and a new regional office, recruiting additional directly employed trainers from the region. We are also investing in a new back-office operating system and introducing state of the art customer relationship management software. These tools will enable us to offer vastly improved delegate record management, more detailed management information reporting for our customers and broaden our scope of products and services.

Transparency and excellent customer experiences are essential to us, and we look forward to sharing these exciting developments with all our customers throughout the year and beyond. 

Finally, you can feel safe knowing that the same colleagues you enjoy working with now will continue to be on hand to help. We envisage no business interruption with this move; purely an exciting opportunity to improve the customer experience.