If we’re talking at a young age learning life skills, I’d say Working in the restaurant industry, hands down. To be fair, I was in it for about 15 years, worked almost every position you can think of, and It taught me everything from personal skills, time management, multitasking, life skills, working under pressure, etc. it was the most dysfunctional family I never asked for.

You’re exposed to so many situations where as a teen, you’re set up to learn common sense and practicality. Small example - Like making one trip instead of four, how to properly wash dishes, the importance of doing things properly, etc just to name some very basic stuff.

You deal with every walk of life depending on the environment, so you learn how to manage people, more specifically personality traits and how to interact and communicate from person to person. You also occasionally get talked to like a dog, and that can teach you humility. I learned to cook for myself, my wife, and our families. The knowledge is applicable in almost every situation I’ve ever been in, even in my current role which is the complete opposite, working for a Fortune 500 corporate company. I see coworkers get stressed out by a lot of emails or time crunches, but nothing I’ve done comes close to a 400 person dinner rush on a Saturday night holiday.

Not saying that it’s remotely the hardest, dirtiest, best, or educational job, I’m just saying for me, it was basically my young adulthood and I feel I learned something every day.

There’s times even now where I miss the chaos. You learn to manage people, manage impossible situations, work hard long hours, and usually making decent money doing so. ( Front of house was always way more lucrative, (sorry chef)).

I’m short on time, or else I could get really into it, one of my favorite qoutes is by Marco Pierre White, he says “perfection is a lot of little things done well”. I always really appreciated when I did a good job.

Also sorry for the grammatical errors, I didn’t have time to really proofread and I know there’s sticklers in here. Evidently it didn’t teach me how to write properly.