Before becoming a transport teacher... publié le 13/01/2023
A vocation under construction...
Transport is related to football !
Let me tell you about my professional experiences.
From 1990 until 1998…
Before becoming a teacher, I worked for nine years in a company, called Transports Grimaud, which I joined because I could speak both Spanish and English. I was one of the first international transport operators in the company ! This family company specialized in the parcels delivery service and the delivery of hanging garments, chartering and logistics.
This was a large transport group as these figures show : 1,500 people working in 40 platforms ; 1,100 lorries, including 250 articulated vehicles ; 19,000 shipments every day.
I worked for four years in Bordeaux, where I was in charge of a delivery line from France to Spain. Every day, a lorry left Bordeaux for Spain and overnight the lorry returned with Spanish parcels to be delivered in France the following day. My job consisted in giving transport charges to customers, providing advice and declaring their goods to customs.
Many of my customers were famous, including Kenzo and Rodier. I was responsible for organising the delivery of a new collection of Kenzo garments to Madrid. These were high-cost garments (the cost of a tie was about €100, so you can imagine the value of a lorry load !!)
In addition, I worked for about an hour every day as a logistician where I prepared orders for the customers’ accounts.
Let me tell you about an anecdote : a driver, a friend of mine, delivered a full screen TV set to Zinedine Zidane. At that time, he was a young professional football player. Unfortunately, I did not keep a copy of the signed consignment note…
After this period in France, I spent two years in Spain, where I was in charge of the movement of goods to France. At the time, I worked in Madrid and Vitoria. However, the place where I most of all spent time was Barcelona, where I was to stay for 18 months. A commercial person and two handlers worked with me. There, I was lucky because a football player was a friend of my handlers and I had the opportunity to meet him and attend five matches at the Camp Nou.
His name is Oscar Garcia and he became a friend of mine.
I came back to France in 1996 in Lyon, where I was in charge of goods movement to and from Turkey, where my main customers were Tefal, SEB and Lacoste. We dealt with a thousand lorries every year and were one of the leaders to this destination.
In Lyon, I learnt what international transport really consisted in : long waiting times for the vehicles at the borders, the surprising attitude of the customs officers outside the European Union, the misunderstanding of the customers waiting for their urgent goods, the problems of misunderstanding the language by the Turkish drivers. All this made for a stressful but exciting job ! Routine does not exist in international road transport.
In 1997, I arrived in Cholet, where I was in charge of Turkish and Greek goods movements. This was my last position in the group.
From 1998 until now…
I hold a Master degree in Commercial Languages and a degree from Salford University, where I spent three months : two months at the University and one month in a translation company as a trainee.
My first teaching experience took place at le Porteau Vocational High School in Poitiers where I started working in September 1998. This school has become Isaac de l’Étoile in 2011. I teach several subjects : transport, logistics, economics, law and English in the European section.
Régis Aumond