Celia Miners

I am responsible for the day to day operations of an 80 vehicle PSV fleet of coaches, buses and mini buses. With 2 duty managers and about 70 drivers reporting to me, I was responsible for the efficient and economic allocation of the contract and commercial workload.

Working very closely with the engineering manager I assisted in making sure the vehicles were available for all planned maintenance work and for replacing vehicles when emergency work was required. I am also responsible for driver hours legal compliance and all HR related factors.

As a qualified transport manager I was accountable directly to the Traffic Commissioner as well as my General Manager and the Company Directors.

I also liaise with external customers and regularly attend client meetings / special event planning meetings etc, and have an open door approach for my team so they can count on me whatever the problem.

I worked alongside the Director as the business opened a new depot in Exeter. We built a very strong business in quite a short space of time. I was responsible for the daily allocation of work and for much of the administration, phone answering, taking quote details, converting to bookings, invoicing, taking payments over the phone and answering queries.

Initially I fostered difficult to place children via a commercial agency. They put me through the rigorous Form F and i was approved to foster 8-18 year olds. These were young people who had been massively let down by their families and usually society. They had often had multiple placements and suffered repeated losses and rejections.

After about 2 years I moved to the local council fostering team, still specialising in the hard to place young people, a decision made so that i could continue to care for a young person even though the budget holders wouldn't authorise the payments to the agency any more.

I made a strategic move to being a Supported Lodgings Carer and found that i very much preferred being a pseudo big sister, rather than a pseudo parent. After 10 years I felt I needed a break from the life under a microscope, and stopped when a placement moved on into independent living.

I ran the day to day operations of a start up industrial recruitment agency. It was a really tough almost saturated market to get into and after 2 years the decision to close was made. This timed perfectly with the fact that I was well under way with my Fostering application process.

I was initially taken on as a temps desk recruitment consultant, a job I enjoyed massively and grew the business substancially and won national (Adecco) awards for it.

As is so often the case I was then flattered into taking a the role of Branch Manager in the newly opened Taunton Branch, and it just didn't work for me at that time in life.

The customer and candidate liaison I enjoyed very much, even enjoyed the sales aspect, but as a 20 something first time manager I left incredibly lonely and didn't enjoy the role as manager at all.

Fresh faced from college I was delighted to score this plum job with a nationwide highly thought of independent recruitment agency, right on my door step. OMG I had hit the jackpot.

In reality I had scored a job with a narcissistic bully, I was one of hundreds of consultants that trudged the stairs to the office. I learned a lot of lessons from this man, but my goodness was he a horrid creature, thriving on his own brutishness and ingnorant practices.

I left without a job to go to as I simply could not take any more from him.