The Real Obstacle to Employee Onboarding? The Unspoken Language No One Teaches

Fresh out of university, with my engineering degree in hand, I joined a large multinational company in the aerospace sector. I was excited, slightly anxious, but confident that my technical background would help me find my footing.

But the first real obstacle I ran into had nothing to do with engineering.
It was the language.
Not the spoken language — but the internal language of the company.

From day one, I found myself surrounded by a flood of acronyms, abbreviations, jargon, and cryptic internal terms, used casually in meetings, emails, documentation, and tools. Everyone else seemed to speak this dialect fluently. I understood every word — and yet somehow, I didn’t understand anything at all.

Like in many large companies, new hires are expected to become “operational” fast. But very little time is spent on the parts of onboarding that aren’t technical — like the language, the culture, or the implicit references behind everyday communication.

For months, I felt like I was missing something crucial. Not because I didn’t know how to do the work — but because I didn’t know how to decode the conversations around me.

When English Isn’t Enough

Things got even more complex in a multilingual, international environment. Official documents were in English, but meetings bounced between English, local languages, and whatever tongue the speaker felt comfortable with.

This wasn’t textbook English — it was corporate English. Heavy accents, region-specific idioms, company buzzwords, and job shortcuts filled every conversation. Everyone seemed to speak their own version of “understandable.” Yet, understanding each other? Far from guaranteed.

I kept asking myself: Does “RFP” mean the same thing here as in another department? Is a “Design Authority” a person, a role, or a whole committee? Even familiar words shifted meaning between teams, cultures, and countries.

There was no single language. Instead, layers piled up — company-wide vocabulary, department-specific terms, role-driven jargon, and hidden acronyms flying around with zero explanation. They rarely matched. They rarely existed in any official document.

Lost in a Sea of Glossaries

At some point, I shared my confusion with a colleague. They suggested I look into the internal document management system and search for a glossary.

I welcomed the idea eagerly — finally, a chance to make sense of all the jargon and acronyms swirling around me.

But that hope quickly faded. A search for the word “glossary” returned around 6,000 documents, spread over a period of 15 years.

That’s thousands of references scattered across decades of corporate history.

Every team, every department, and even individuals had created their own version of the so-called “truth.” Most often, these were Excel files — rarely updated and sometimes contradicting each other.

Trying to piece everything together felt like navigating a labyrinth with no map.

The result is clear:
Knowledge becomes unreadable. It’s too fragmented, too scattered, often obsolete, and rarely maintained.

New employees don’t just have to learn their jobs. They have to decode a chaotic, ever-changing language that nobody has bothered to organize.

What’s the Real Problem?

Looking back, I believe one of the most underestimated barriers to integration in big organizations is not technical complexity, but linguistic and conceptual fragmentation.

It’s invisible, but it slows you down.
It isolates new employees.
It makes smart people feel lost.
And worse — it makes them afraid to ask.

We talk a lot about improving onboarding.
But that won’t happen unless we build a common language first — and treat it like infrastructure.

That means:

• Creating shared, living, collaborative reference materials
• Making them easy to find, use, and update
• Valuing clarity as much as productivity
• And recognizing that understanding is part of the job — not something you’re expected to fake until you make it

This experience never really left me. Years later, I’m still fascinated by the gap between what companies say — and what new hires actually hear.
And I’ve come to believe that shared language is the first step toward shared culture.

Ever felt the same? Let’s talk about it on LinkedIn.