Recommendations: Acronym List (AKA Alphabet Soup)

When I started working in industry, I often felt totally lost in meetings. From what I've heard, it's not exclusive to any one company - we all speak in what sometimes sounds like Simlish with millions of acronyms. I was lucky to start within one month of a colleague who's become a good friend, and along with a contractor in our department we created a file that is affectionately named "Alphabet Soup". We periodically all update it and share it with any new hires in our department. All it is is an alphabetized Excel sheet that I periodically dump into Word and export as a PDF. Anytime any of us hears a new acronym, we figure out what it means and add it to the file. We're currently at... 189 acronyms. Jeez.

One of our new hires has said that he keeps the Excel sheet open during every call he has - he was hired at a higher grade level than us so there are OODLES more acronyms in his calls than even ours.

To summarize - make an alphabet soup. It's good soup.