As an ex-researcher turned advisor, I still consider several practices of the corporate world as bizarre. One of them caught my attention as soon as I started in my new position this year: hyper-inflated job titles1 and acronyms. Here is a list of my favourites:
- Key Account Manager (KAM)
- Personal Assistant (PA)
- Subject Matter Expert (SME)
- Vice President (VP)
George Carlin would probably have considered this list as “tortured modern language designed to soften reality, make people feel good, and in general dress things up a little.” 🙂 In this post, I aim to show how you could reduce the number of words in these titles and make a better use of the lingua franca we all agreed on.
Footnotes
- For simplicity, I will not distinguish between titles, ranks, and roles. ↩