MARK McGhee has just emerged from the sort of isolation which leaves a man checking the wires on his landline and calling his mobile phone provider, just to check if everything still works.

Things can seem to go very quiet for a manager when he's between jobs – and not sure if he'll ever get another one – and McGhee has just endured 14 months in the occupational equivalent of Siberia.

In fact, he was living very comfortably with his family in Brighton, but the hunger to return to management was a constant companion and so was the desire to rebuild a reputation which suffered pain and damage at Aberdeen. McGhee maintained enough contacts in the game to hear which jobs were coming up, and which would appeal to him and might come his way, and yesterday the reward finally came when he was appointed at Bristol Rovers.

The club is languishing in 18th position in League Two, just six points off the bottom of the table, so the room for improvement is considerable. McGhee was never able to get Aberdeen going in his 18 months there and left them at the wrong end of the Clydesdale Bank Premier League, but in his spells with Reading, Leicester City, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Millwall and Motherwell he made a name for himself as a manager who could quickly deliver results even if sustained consistency was often elusive.

Few managers have seen their standing rise and fall as dramatically as McGhee's did during four years in Scotland. He was an excellent Motherwell manager who led the club with dignity and sensitivity at the time of Phil O'Donnell's death. Having finished third in 2008 he was an outside candidate for the Celtic job when his friend, Gordon Strachan, left. Owner Dermot Desmond spoke to him but eventually gave the job to Tony Mowbray. McGhee was also short-listed with Graeme Souness, the late Tommy Burns and George Burley for the Scotland job in 2008. Yet, by the end of 2010, he left Aberdeen with the horror of a 9-0 defeat at Celtic disfiguring his record.

At 54, he remains a manager with energy, ideas and ambition, but also one realistic enough to know he might not get another platform for any of those qualities. It worked in his favour that he tends to be a convincing interviewee, though, and having made it on to a four-man shortlist for the Bristol job he was described as being "streets ahead" of rival candidates Keith Curle, Richard Money and Geraint Williams.

"I'm quite nervous but I hope the nerves show that I'm not complacent and thinking that it's going to be easy," said McGhee yesterday after the obligatory photographs holding up his new club's scarf. "I know there's work to be done and I'm looking forward to it."

What should Rovers expect under him?. "Over time, the minimum they should expect is not to be in this division. Even in their present form they should consider themselves capable of being in at least the first division [League One].

"Beyond that the coming of a new stadium will, hopefully, bring even greater times. That's a part of why I'm here – I see a project, it's not just a case of me coming here and firefighting. There's a future here. There's a really exciting future possibly for the club and I'm delighted to be a part of it."

Rovers left their traditional home at Eastville in 1986 and after a decade of groundsharing in Bath, and then moving to current base The Memorial Stadium in 1998, a deal was struck last month for them to move again to a £40m purpose-built, 20,000-capacity stadium. The planning process must still be completed but the proposed move has created a sense of anticipation around what might otherwise be a demoralised club.

Rovers, whose supporters are disparagingly referred to as "Gasheads" because a large gas storage tank used to be near Eastville, are in the shadow of Derek McInnes' Bristol City. Bristol's population is roughly the size of Edinburgh's and City are recognised as the bigger club and currently compete two levels above Rovers, in the npower Championship.

McGhee follows recent managers Paul Trollope, Dave Penney, and Paul Buckle in attempting to revive a club which was relegated last April. Chairman Nick Higgs, inevitably, was full of enthusiasm about his new man. "I think we're very fortunate to have Mark here. The calibre of candidates we had this time even excelled the calibre we had last time, but Mark was streets ahead of anybody else.

"If you were fortunate enough to attend the interviews that we had, we had three candidates out of a shortlist of a number and Mark sold himself very, very well. He showed that he's not coming here for just a stepping stone to get back into his career, he wants to come and rebuild the club and go forward.

"We've reached a low ebb and we need to move forward and it was a very impressive interview. I liked what I heard about his training regimes and the way he conducts non-matchdays with players. I thought it was incredibly impressive."

McGhee's first job in English football for nearly six years began yesterday when he signed a two-and-a-half-year contract. It made him Rovers' fourth appointment in just over 13 months. The club may have been unhappy but it has certainly been busy. Now, at long last, McGhee can get down to work too.