RONALD MCDONALD is on the warpath. The fast-food chain Prince Charles loves to hate has launched a campaign against British dictionaries to persuade them to drop the term "McJob". Look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and you'll see that it describes "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, especially one created by the expansion of the service sector".

For a company which prides itself on adding words to the English language by ingeniously adding "Mc" to the front of them, McDonald's is particularly touchy about this one.

Ever since "McJob" was popularised by Douglas Coupland in his 1991 novel Generation X, the company has been in a lather. In 2003, the McDonald's Corporation threatened legal action against American dictionaries for using the term, which they feel insults their workforce and employment practices.

In this country, the fast food retailer is on a charm offensive - not a legal one. For the last week it has been releasing a (Mc)flurry of positive information about the chain. McDonald's restaurant managers earn £40,000 and drive a company car. Staff turnover under the golden arches is half the national average. The company features regularly in the "good employer" league tables and recently won Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine's "Best Place to Work in Hospitality Award".

As it happens, I'm opposed to the use of the term "McJob" too, but not because I hold a brief for McDonald's. It seems to me that the only person who decides whether your job is unstimulating with no prospects is you.

I speak from experience. I've done my stint flipping burgers, though my uniform was brown and orange nylon rather than yellow, and I learned more about the world of work while I was sizzling up patties of recovered meat than I ever did in a newsroom.

During my time at the burger bar I learned who was a shirker and who was a moaner. I learned to quickly size up who could be trusted and who should be avoided, and I learned it takes three visits to the shower to get the smell of onion rings out of your hair.

It was just one in a string of low-paid jobs I took as a school-leaver, and I gained something from every one.

A stint in a coffee shop serving scones to a collection of solitary afternoon tea drinkers did more for my understanding of the loneliness of the elderly than a thousand Help The Aged leaflets.

I discovered more about the insidious power of workplace sexual abuse from one creepy boss in a restaurant than anything I investigated while reporting for a national business paper.

Those little life competencies, picked up as side orders to my main job of toasting buns, packing salads and tossing fries, have held me in better stead for the rest of my career than anything I'd done before, or since.

It's that awareness of the unexpected benefits of putting your shoulder to an unglamorous wheel that makes me feel instinctively that the Scottish Executive is right to be encouraging school pupils to get on-the-job training as part of their education.

The policy, which would also raise the school leaving age to 18, aims to build work experience into the school curriculum. I suspect kids will learn more from their experience in the world of work than in any classroom.

Whether in the boardroom or on the lowliest rung of the corporate ladder, the skills you pick up while you're there are much more valuable than the ones you're getting paid to exercise. We may pretend work is about big battles, grand ambitions and glamorous challenges, but we all secretly know at heart it's about learning to size up and work alongside other people.

It's yet another reason why The Apprentice is such compelling guff. The workplace "reality" TV show has about as much to do with the real world of work as Dr Who does with quantum physics. In the world of The Apprentice, the 1980s never ended. Shoulder pads are in. Toughness marks the men from the boys. Last year's most bonkers contestant, Ruth Badger, looked as though she wanted to rip the heads off her competitors. She lost, and Michelle Dewsbury, who won, was even worse.

Well it's all back again. This week the BBC unveiled the latest collection of pushy sociopaths to compete for the chance of a "top job" with Alan Sugar.

At the beginning of the week there were two Scots in the bunch. Podgy Andy Jackson has already been done over by the tabloids because of his allegedly dodgy past. The other, Ghazal Asif, is the one who's getting all the attention. With her sleek hair, long legs and chilly poise, Ms Asif looks every inch the alpha female. You can already hear Sugar slobbering. To cap it all, Ms Asif has the kind of high-flying uber CV nobody can approach in real life. She speaks five languages and has quit a job with a company turning over £6 million a year to get some prime time TV exposure. So far so Learjet.

However, interestingly, while The Apprentice appears to reward the pushy and the competitive, it covertly endorses another set of values. The only Apprentice winner who Sugar seems entirely in favour of was nice guy Tim Campbell from series one.

His skills? Fairness, playing by the rules and respecting his peers. Despite the headline glitz, it's only when you look beyond the headlines in Ms Asif's CV that you realise she might actually have what it takes to win the show.

It turns out the glamorous 23-year-old worked briefly at the cosmetics counter at Frasers in Glasgow. Who knows what life skills she picked up while flogging lippy to the ladies? Even in the unreal world of The Apprentice her real-life work experience might make all the difference.