.

Yeah,  me to, mostly self taught and also able to mostly instinctively know the correct grammar but the formal parts and words just hurt my brain. I keep going back to it but it doesn’t seem to get any easier. 

After years and years of experience I know most of the correct grammar instinctively.

I just cannot identify the formal parts or understand the jargon used by the experts.

I get told off for using split infinitives.  What the f**K is an infinitive.

To make matters worse I went to college with one guy who was an expert.  Grammar school, ten 'O' levels plus English 'A' level.  I went to special schools and normal comprehensive.

He was always correcting me and once asked  me,  if I was taught English, or did I just pick it up?

He was right, I am self taught.

I’ve been at learning this stuff for years but even though I love reading and writing and I love the granmer side of things, I just can’t seem to get my head around a lot of it. I think I need to be taught it in a different way. Maybe I’ll do a course in it someday. 

These are very basic.

I am still struggling to learn formal English grammar at this moment.

Topics like tenses:

Present simple,

Present continuous, 

Past simple,

Past continuous,

Present perfect simple,

Present perfect continuous,

The differences and similarities etc.  Are doing my head in.

I should have known it really, I trained as a medical secretary so I’m pretty sure I learned it there. I don’t think everyone follows those kinds of grammatical rules today, I like to and still like learning them, but I do forget.

A careers advisor, working for a recruitment agency should know it!

Thanks. I couldn’t remember what it was. 

You put 

Yours faithfully,

NOT

Yours sincerely,

Even I, who failed English language O level five times, knows that!

I think that it's great that you're planning ahead - that's the first step towards improving your life!

For confidence, I think it's important to gauge your ability, traits etc, and really get to know yourself. Know what you like and don't like, what you're good at, what you're weaker at, what you'd like to improve. Get a proper sense of who you are, where you'd like to be, and what you can do to get there. Accept yourself for who you are, and accept your imperfections. By accepting who we are and knowing ourselves, we can become confident in our abilities, feelings and decisions!

You've made a good start on confidence though, so well done for that!

For friends, I think you're doing great already. You're doing the right things by getting involved, working on skills and challenging yourself. Keep pushing yourself and get that experience - practice makes perfect. Knowing what you like, or what you'd like to know more about, could help you join some more specific groups and connect with people over certain subjects, which provides natural conversation with anyone there!

For the job, I think that's important to go back to what you really enjoy and find important. Remember, you could be in this job for up to 50 years (in some cases!), so make sure it's something that's close to your heart and enjoyable, otherwise you may not be happy for the duration of your tenure there. I think it's okay to apply to some places to see if you like the role - if you don't, then atleast you've tried it and know you don't want to; if you do, then that's great! The courses will be really good to build your CV - I'd also suggest getting involved with a sports club team, and volunteering (like you said) to make your application really stand out!x

Much love <3

Handi-andis, do you have any tips on how to find out what your strengths are? Are you in work at the moment? I’m the same as you, the job needs to mean something to me otherwise I get bored of it very quickly. 

What are you supposed to end a letter with when you put Dear Sir/Madam? I think I remember learning this at some point and I’ve clearky forgotten. 

WoW that is totally overwhelming to me, just reading it almost scrambled my brain. I can see your system and work in a similar way when I’m doing my job as a social worker. I guess I just need to accept that just now, I’m in burnout, because reading that freaked me out. It sounds exhausting. But I guess it is also a matter of how important it is to you to get a job. I’m not looking to work for anyone else but if I was, I think I’d follow this method. 

I have several up to date CVs.   Several because I have four advisors all giving different advice.  Job centre insists I remove address for confidentiality and security.  Recruitment agency insists it must be included.

Also different CVs for different types of jobs.

Some CVs are economical with the truth.

I include a unique customised covering letter with each CV.  I do a better job than one of my advisors. She wrote a letter for me with a Dear Sir/Madam  and closed with yours sincerely.  I prompted her and she said "it doesn't matter". 

Other issues are clean interview suits and paying attention to personal hygiene.

Many websites give endless advice.  My favourite is the University of Kent careers site.

It’s had its moments but for me to put energy into something and do a good job I have to be passionate about it. 

I tend to compartmentalise a lot, so open applications don't matter to me, once they are sent off they are then irrelevant until I hear back from them again. Cover letter and CV could be filed so I could see what was send to them, spreadsheet showed all applications, dates sent, who to etc. if I needed to refer back to things.

I tend to find as with all things, only have in processing the data that is immediately relative, everything else can be stored in some easily accessible way, but if you don't need to be actively dealing with it then you can file it (both electronically and mentally) until a time that it's needed again.

.

That's interesting, because if you can do that, it strongly suggests my monotropic tendencies are worse than I'd thought. 

If I had as many applications open as you suggest, they would all become a blur.

It's fairly easy to tailor a CV and cover letter though, with a bit of online research you can easily get through 1-2 an hour. Limiting yourself to to only 3 open applications, when applications can stay open for weeks will mean that virtually any form of progress will ground to a halt.

Last time I had to actively apply for jobs was about 8 years ago (rather than looking in my spare time to see if there was anything better available) and I managed about 12 applications a day (six days a week), of those over the course of the week and a half I was applying I was offered 62 interviews off the back of those cover letters and CVs. I then chose the eight of them I really wanted to go for and had those eight interviews over 8 days, in the prep for those interviews I did a crib sheet on the company which I memorised before the interview.

With the ability to modify cover letters and CVs digitally and email them in seconds (as well as submitting your CV to an agency who will often tailor it for each role they apply for on your behalf), there's no reason a person couldn't complete 50+ applications over the course of a week.

I would personally advise against applying for too many roles. Each application needs to be properly tailored and targeted - do not use a generic CV, re-write your CV each time to fit the description of the job you are applying for. 

I doubt I would entertain more than (say) 3 open applications at any one time, otherwise there's too much going on.

Not doing your research on the company you have applied to is also bad form. Make sure you know more about the company (and the likely problems they need you to solve) than the overwhelming majority of other candidates. 

Alopochen said:

To progress towards having a job I have: tried various online courses; read books and websites about jobs; studied subjects in detail whilst I liked them. Currently I'm studying stock market investing. I got bored of every other job I looked into so I don't know what else I would do.

You'll find that a lot of jobs are boring, especially entry level jobs until you are given responsibility and are able to progress up the career ladder. You pretty much have to suck it up and do the boring jobs to get a shot at the not boring jobs (unless you're lucky enough to have a great aptitude in a profession that's short of labour), there are very few reasonably or well paid jobs that are genuinely enjoyable from the start, primarily because competition for them is high and so they will be looking for the candidate that demonstrates drive, ability, aptitude and dedication.

A lot of people will tell you to follow your heart, don't, follow your head. Plan out what you want from work, how much you want to be paid, what kind of hours and commute you will be ok with, what work you are capable of, see what options that gives you, then narrow that down further by looking at what employment prospects you have in those sectors. That will be things like required education, experience, skills, who you know who can give you a leg up etc. Once you've done that you'll have a final shortlist, see what jobs are available and apply for them all, then take it from there.