This week’s Yorkshire appointments

This week’s round up of Yorkshire appointments includes Pro-Development, Hortor and virtualDCS. Read on to find out more.

Tracey Flannery, Pro-Development

Former York Science Park CEO, Tracey Flannery, has joined Pro-Development founder, Michelle Mook, as a shareholder and director of the fast-growing York-based company, which specialises in employee engagement and development.

Tracey joined Pro-Development in 2020 as a learning and development consultant to provide strategic support for the team and help clients.

Working with businesses, large and small in Yorkshire and Humber, the team helps improve employee retention and engagement through a range of leadership and management development programmes and training, ultimately to achieve better engagement and greater success.

Tracey (pictured left) said: “It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to become a shareholder in a business that I am passionate about, and I feel is bursting with potential. I jumped at the chance to be a part of Pro-Development.

“I am extremely excited to be part of the leadership team as we enter the next chapter of growth whilst ensuring our existing customers continue to receive high quality support and guidance. Our mutual passion to make a difference to the businesses we work with is what makes this a perfect partnership and we both enjoy bringing a sense of fun into what we do.

Michelle (pictured right) added: “It’s no coincidence that we have grown at the rate we have since Tracey joined the team. She’s helped to put a solid strategy in place and move the business forward already in the 18 months she has been here.”

Jack Paul and Fletcher Coutts, Hortor

Hortor, the resourcing and managed service consultancy headquartered in Leeds, has appointed Jack Paul as strategic development manager and promoted Fletcher Coutts to divisional manager specialising in the cleantech sector.

With a business management background having worked for a UK and Northern Ireland based franchise, Jack is looking forward to taking on a new challenge and to advancing his skills and career in the sector.

He said: “This is a very different role to anything I have done before but I’m ready for the challenge. The job was actually referred to me by a friend that works at Hortor. Knowing they have had such a positive experience was really encouraging.”

He will be responsible for supporting a global portfolio of clients that are looking for market leading talent in the IT, Telecoms, Energy, FinTech and Financial Services sectors.

Having joined the business in March 2021 as a Market and Business Development Consultant, Fletcher Coutts has secured his second promotion at Hortor becoming a Divisional Manager specialising in cleantech.

He said: “It has certainly been a very positive journey for me so far, with two promotions since I joined last year. I am now looking to build my reputation within the cleantech sector and to become an obvious choice for the progressive businesses that we support with their growth strategies.”

Kurt Kiefer and Judd Deighton, virtualDCS

Leeds based virtualDCS, has made two key appointments, which coincides with the cloud computing and disaster recovery specialist unveiling a brand-new solution and another innovative UK first by the company.

Kurt Kiefer (pictured left) has joined virtualDCS as chief revenue officer, to spearhead the company’s desire to be the leading channel only partner of Veeam, which is the leader in backup, recovery and data management solutions that deliver modern data protection.

Kurt brings a host of channel experience to the role from leading IT vendors including Red Hat, Dell, HP, and immutable object storage provider, Zadara.

virtualDCS has also welcomed support apprentice, Judd Deighton (pictured right), who will be involved in the company’s disaster recovery suite, CloudCover and the Veeam service range. Judd plans to eventually become one of virtualDCS’s fully qualified Veeam architects.

These latest appointments follow virtualDCS launching the UK’s first solution to bridge the data protection limitations of the popular open-source container software, Kubernetes, commonly dubbed K8s.

Kurt commented: “As new technologies, like K8s mature in the marketplace, it is exciting to work with a company that focuses on innovative services and enabling the industry to protect data from the ever-growing threats of cyber-criminals and ransomware.”


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