Pre-prepared lot, thought would try and throw everything at it! Military career track has the actual lowest number of required friends. General skill boosters to smash job skills out of the way on first day and friends incremented therein with help of popularity aspiration benefit & souvenir racks.

No sleeping/bed/shower required as dead previous sim has helpfully left some old career reward objects to boost motives of all sims, leaving plenty of time for making friends (or lonely yoga??).

I think there was 1 promotion skip (counting by promotion memories), and it took until the end of the run for me to realize that by some sheer luck the sim had "general career" as their lifetime aspiration - not that I think this added to the run speed in any way. Still plenttty of room for improvement!