1. Leaving uni/finding a job in London

A lot of people I know dreaded leaving university and the happy life of a student, and I won’t say I didn’t have pangs of nostalgia for various aspects of Durham, but at the same time I was more than ready to leave. I wanted to see how I would do in the real world, and whilst being a student was fantastic fun, as I learnt a lot and met many great friends, it is a bubble that separates you from reality - a conscious, deliberate bubble - and you do feel like you’ve fallen out of touch with the world most of the time. I wanted to be working and living a normal working life. Hence I left with only the minimum of sad feelings, though I will always look back on those days as being fun and exciting, and far less worrying or tiresome than the real world!!
After a short family trip to Scotland (since we were up North anyway), I came back home to Canterbury, signed on to the dole and got job hunting.
I had quite a difficulty trying to work out whether to find a place to live or a place to work first, as I had neither sorted to begin with. At first, I was all for finding a base in London first, but then I decided (with a little help from family and friends!) that getting a place to live without any actual money might make it a little hard to pay the rent…so I went job hunting first. I think in retrospect that this was the wrong thing to do, as finding a place to live is in reality an utter nightmare (see my next blog entry). If you have a place to live, there are many ways to earn a bit of cash to pay your first rent - but you will need the money for a deposit straightaway (again, see next blog entry for more info).
Anyway, I got job hunting.
The first thing I will say is that I hate signing on to the dole. I firmly believe that the government makes it difficult on purpose so that less people sign on. I have signed on twice now, and this time was easier, as in London there are difficulties concerning different boroughs and who to contact/where to go to sign on etc. However, it is your right to receive money from the government as being a British citizen, and since the government will take more than enough tax off you once you start working, I would heartily recommend that everyone signs on, despite the absolute headache it is to get it all sorted (as an example - their phone system is abysmal: your phonecalls get moved around to different departments so that you have to repeat the same info over and over and actually never get anywhere). I would also ignore the jobs that they try and find you unless it is exactly what you are looking for, because often it is not at all what you are looking for and you can do better looking for jobs yourself.
Finding a job the first time around was - especially in this current financial climate - surprisingly easy for me. I was looking for retail and sales assistant positions, as I had experience of these in my gap year, and since I was aiming for London but living in Canterbury, all my applications were done online.
I searched directgov.uk, gumtree.co.uk and reed.co.uk for retail positions. By far, the least professional-looking of these is gumtree, and yet all three of my jobs I have had between then and now all came from gumtree, so it is definitely effective. Directgov was also good, but I have heard some rumours about Reed, such as their ‘forgetting’ to pass on CVs to companies thanks to some particularly neglectful administrators, and that has put me off them a bit. I don’t know if the rumours are true, but I do know I have sent many hundreds of CVs to different companies through them and did not receive one invitation to attend an interview.
About two weeks in to the jobhunting, I was offered to have an interview with The London Print Company who were looking for what they called a Sales Assistant. It actually transpired to be more of an Office Assistant position, with far more responsibility than I had had before, but I’ve always been good at interviews and it was clear I could handle the workload, so Nick (the owner) took me on. He received 150 applications in one week and said it was the most he had ever received for the role - which just shows the current financial climate in England at the moment.
I was offered 14k as a starting salary. In London especially, that is a very basic salary, probably the lowest you can get and yet live on actually, but I was just happy to get a job and accepted. It is, after all, still fine to live on!
However, the next problem was that they needed someone to start straight away, and I had not figured out a place to live yet…

Update

Well. Wow. The last time I updated it was May 2011. Now it is January 2012 and I have so much to update and talk about, I don’t know where to begin.
What I should do is tell you how I’m going to lay out my experiences in the next few blog entries, so here we are:

1. Leaving uni/finding a job in London.
2. Finding a houseshare in London.
3. Being fired (thank you recession!) and attempting to find a new job in London.

I have been through a lot, but it has all been amazing experience and I can’t wait to write it all out for everyone and show you all how you can overcome the same difficulties.