Somewhere a few years from now, you will sit down to fill in your first real job application, and a stranger who has never met you will decide, from that single page, whether you are worth an interview. That is a frightening amount of power to hand a sheet of paper, and it is exactly why the English in this unit matters: the application form, the letter of application, and the polite formal register that carries both. Get these right and the paper speaks well of you before you have said a word.
The grammar that fits the career world is the past perfect passive — "had been + V3" — the tense for "the post had already been filled before I called" — plus the strict, polite shape of a formal letter. By the end of this unit you should be able to fill a real form, write a 100-word application letter, and know why "Yours faithfully" and "Yours sincerely" are not interchangeable.
Before you can apply for a job, you have to know what kind of person you are at work, and most people never ask themselves until it is too late. The Grade 10 questionnaire acts like a mirror: answer it honestly and a shape starts to appear. Someone who loves the outdoors, working with their hands, and does not mind travel is being quietly pointed away from a desk and towards, say, engineering or agriculture.
The questionnaire asks which area you see yourself working in (agriculture, industry, entertainment, business, arts and crafts, science and technology, education, environment, health, politics, law, media, defence, travel and transport, or other), whether you prefer indoor or outdoor work, whether you prefer working with people, ideas or things, how you rank salary against job satisfaction, whether you will need higher education such as a diploma, degree or professional qualification, and how willing you are to travel — locally, regionally or internationally.
The textbook then asks you to draw a mind map for any job with five branches: place of work, type of work, working hours, advantages and disadvantages. Once those five boxes are filled, your paragraph almost writes itself — you simply join the boxes into sentences. Try it for "Teacher" or "Bank Officer" and watch the page fill.
These words fall into a natural sequence, the same order your own career will follow: first the jobs themselves, then the qualifications that unlock them, then the workplace words you meet once you apply, and finally the polite phrases a formal letter is built from. Learning them in that order means the vocabulary arrives in the same order you will need it.
| Category | Words |
|---|---|
| Jobs | doctor, nurse, teacher, accountant, architect, engineer, banker, journalist, chef, police officer, graphic designer, IT technician, receptionist, driver, welder, electrician, entrepreneur, researcher |
| Qualifications | GCE O/L, GCE A/L, diploma, degree, BSc / BA / LLB / MBBS, certificate, professional membership |
| Workplace words | vacancy, post, candidate, applicant, employer, employee, CV / resumé, cover letter, referee, interview, salary, allowance, pension, promotion, probation |
| Polite letter phrases | I write with reference to…, I have the honour to apply for…, I should be grateful if…, Looking forward to a positive reply…, I remain, Yours faithfully… |
Imagine you phone about a job and the manager says, "Sorry, the post was filled last week." Two things happened in the past, but one happened before the other — the filling came before your call. English marks that "earlier-past" with the past perfect, and when you care about the thing rather than who did it, you make it passive: had been + past participle (V3). So "the post had been filled before I called".
Build it in two easy moves. Start from the active past perfect ("his uncle had told him"), then swap the focus to the receiver and drop in "been": "he had been told". That little "been" is the same hinge you meet in the present perfect passive — it is what turns a doer-sentence into a done-to sentence.
| Active | Passive |
|---|---|
| His uncle had told him about the vacancy. | He had been told about the vacancy by his uncle. |
| Somebody had taken my pen. | My pen had been taken. |
| Mr. Perera had checked the power supply. | The power supply had been checked. |
| The Principal had read the letter. | The letter had been read. |
To make it negative, slip "not" after "had": "Experience had not been asked for." To ask a question, move "had" to the front: "Had any qualifications been asked for?" The trap students fall into is using the bare verb — "had been receive" — when the passive always needs the participle: had been received.
A letter of application is the one piece of writing where being predictable is a virtue. The reader has a hundred letters to skim, so they want every part exactly where they expect it — like a form with invisible boxes. Your job is not to be original; it is to drop the right thing in each box so nothing makes the reader pause. Leave a block out and the letter looks careless before a word is even read.
Walk down the shape and notice each block answers a silent question: who are you (your address), when (date), who are you writing to (their address), what is this about (the CAPITAL subject line), and then three tidy paragraphs — where I saw the job, what I bring, why pick me.
Here is the rule that catches everyone: the sign-off must match the greeting. If you opened "Dear Sir / Madam," with no name, you close Yours faithfully. If you knew the name and opened "Dear Mr. Perera," you close Yours sincerely. Think of it this way — a stranger gets your faith, a named person gets your sincerity.
A form looks like the easy task, and that is the trap — the easy marks vanish the moment a field is left blank. A model form filling in the post of Junior Receptionist shows every line answered, written in BLOCK CAPITALS so nothing is misread, and the fiddly bits people skip — both referees with their titles, the signed certification line at the bottom — all present.
A typical form asks for: post applied for, name in full, permanent address, contact number, e-mail, date of birth, age, sex, schools attended, educational qualifications, other qualifications, co-curricular activities, experience, two referees, and a signature with the date. The examiner is really testing whether you can follow instructions carefully under pressure, so the lesson is dull but worth full marks: fill every field, use block capitals, line your answers up neatly, and never leave the referees half-done.
A model letter applying for the post of Junior Receptionist at Family Hospital, Maharagama (about 100 words) lands every block in its place: address and date top-right, the manager's address below, the CAPITAL subject line, then three lean paragraphs — where I saw the advert, what I bring, when I am free. Watch the tone: it never begs and never boasts. "I should be grateful if you would consider my application" is firm but polite, the register a manager expects. And the ending obeys the matching rule — it opened "Dear Sir / Madam," so it closes "Yours faithfully". Keep it this tight; a 100-word letter has no room for waffle, only for the required facts, well dressed.
| Task | Official word count |
|---|---|
| Notice | 40–50 words |
| Paragraph (Test 8) | 50–60 words |
| Letter of application (Test 14) | ~100 words |
| Article / career essay (Test 16) | ~200 words |
Match the sign-off to the greeting every time: "Dear Sir / Madam" closes with "Yours faithfully"; "Dear Mr. Perera" closes with "Yours sincerely". Never write "Looking forward for" — it is "Looking forward to". A subject line typed in CAPITALS earns easy marks and costs nothing.
The formal letter is one of the most heavily weighted writing tasks on the whole paper, and past perfect — in both active and passive — is a fixture of the verb-form passages in Test 12. Career and interview vocabulary also feeds the matching and gap-fill tasks. Master the letter shape and the "been" hinge and you have covered a great deal of ground for the exam as a whole.
| Past-paper test | What was tested |
|---|---|
| 2017 Test 11 | Fill the blanks: hiring an assistant manager (interview vocabulary) |
| 2019 Test 13 | Match descriptions of people to job ads |
| 2020 Test 13 | Match films to viewers (similar matching skill) |
| 2017 Test 14 (b) | Table: where 125 students like to study after A/L |
| 2019 Test 14 (a) | Letter on Teachers' Day celebration — formal-letter shape |
| 2018 Test 12, 2019 Test 12 | Verb-form passages using past simple + past perfect (active and passive) |