Office Politics
Working Environment
Pay Rises and Money
Personal Development
Confidence
Promotion
Productivity & Personal Skills
Stress
Talk the talk
A new language is thriving at work. Will it make you a mover and shaker? Or just look like an idiot? Here are the words we love to hate – whether we use them or not.
It’s no secret that the one of the best ways to get ahead in business is to learn a new language. But nowadays we’re not talking evening classes in Spanish or Japanese – corporate jargon is the latest trend for the truly ambitious.
The facts
According to a survey by recruitment consultancy Office Angels, office gobbledegook is spreading rapidly among Britain’s workforce. Those unfamiliar with terms such as ‘helicopter view’ (summary/ wide view of the picture) and ‘etailing’ (internet retailing) will soon be in the minority. The study revealed that 55 per cent of office workers polled used some form of office jargon, mainly when in meetings.
Twenty per cent of employees felt obliged to use such terms in an effort to keep up with colleagues despite not always having a clear idea what they meant. It also appears that the use of office jargon is more common in the South than in any other region of the UK.
‘Office jargon is extremely widespread,’ says Sara Eldoori, Head of Marketing and Publicity at Office Angels. ‘People often use it in meetings as a way to show off, be in control or display their expertise. We also found that it tends to be more prevalent in the creative sectors such as advertising and IT or new media but it’s also starting to infiltrate the more traditional sectors as well.’
Office jargon originated in the US and from the Internet but new phrases are being introduced all the time. There are currently around 40,000 combinations of office jargon in use in the UK workplace.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | next
printer friendly
send to a friend
Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Horoscopes| Message Boards | Quizzes | Newsletters | Join
iVillage Ltd is a UK company registered in England & Wales (3837269) at 80-110 New Oxford Street, London WC1 1HB
