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Remember your first job? Remember what it was like to be a newbie trainee? As it turns out, sometimes the lessons that you take away from your first job aren't the ones that you thought you were being trained to learn. The scut work of a first job can, over time, become the lifelong lessons that undergird an entire career.

At least that's what we learned from 15 well-trained leaders and accomplished performers, all of whom looked back on their first jobs as a source of their current success. What were those first experiences all about? And how did those first jobs create lasting lessons? Read about their workplace training -- and see how the results of that training can go on working for a long time.

Richard Branson

Chairman
The Virgin Group
London, England

I've never worked for anybody else, so my first real job was at a business that I started at boarding school when I was 16. At that time, the Vietnam War was going on and the Paris student uprising had just occurred. I felt that school was a place where grown-ups were just trying to keep us busy. I decided to start a magazine that would address some of those issues. I didn't even have a phone, so I used a public telephone at school to sell advertising for my magazine. Over a six-month period, I managed to raise about $6,000, which was enough to cover the cost of printing and paper, so I decided to leave school to start the magazine. Being a precocious, overly enthusiastic young boy, I managed to get a lot of big celebrities -- James Baldwin, Vanessa Redgrave, Jean-Paul Sartre -- to write or be interviewed for the magazine. We started Virgin Records as a mail-order company in the magazine. We sold records cheaper than full price, and we built credibility through the kind of products that we offered -- Frank Zappa, say, rather than Andy Williams. When I was about 18, I decided that the music industry was easier than the magazine industry, so I dropped the magazine but kept Virgin Records going. Everything else has grown from there.

I started the magazine because I had a passion for what I was doing. That's also why I went into the airline business, even though everybody I talked to told me that there was no money to be made there. I felt that I could make a difference. That's the best reason to go into business -- because you feel strongly that you can change things.

Richard Branson is chairman of the Virgin Group, a privately owned conglomerate that has spawned such companies as Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Interactive, Virgin Megastores, and Virgin Records.

Jerry Colonna

Managing Partner
Flatiron Partners LLC
New York, New York

For three summers in a row, starting when I was about 13, I worked as a locker-repair boy for a company called A to Z Locker Repair. The guy who was sort of the foreman of our group was extremely influential in my development. His name was Jack Martin. He had never finished high school, but he had saved up his money and had opened up a bar. Then he developed cancer of the larynx and had to speak through a hole in his throat. Every now and then, he'd have to clean out the hole, which was kind of disconcerting, but for the most part, we didn't think much about it because Jack was the most capable person on our team. He could look at a bent, broken-down locker and figure out how to put it back together so that some 16-year-old, 250-pound football player couldn't rip it apart.