Good starter pieces in my opinion are.
Chess pieces (starting with pawns, rooks then moving on to the knights)
Furniture ( office furniture and furniture you would find around the home)
Then move on to general misc. game items like bins, shelves, lockers and crates (also practicing texturing skills).
Try to set yourself limits before each model too, give yourself a realistic deadline and/or polygon/texture counts.
Its always good practice to keep your mesh clean no matter how high polygon you are planning to make it.
After you have perfected these and gotten to know the tools of your preferred package then you can start moving onto characters and vehicles, don't jump straight ahead though else you
may fail at doing something, then that will knock your confidence and you won't want to model at all.
[Looking for work]