onboarding
onboarding noun: the process of bringing a new employee on board, incorporating training and orientation. Also the present participle and gerund of onboard.
Noun
onboarding (countable and uncountable, plural onboardings)
- The process of bringing a new employee on board, incorporating training and orientation.
- Onboarding gets your new employees up to speed twice as fast as separate efforts to recruit, orient, and manage.2009, George B. Bradt, Mary Vonnegut, Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 7
- As Sunak disappears inside, pursued by the clicks of photographers’ cameras, the new prime minister will begin a flurry of activity, with civil service staff guiding a new team of political appointees through what is known as “onboarding”, involving everything from computer log-ins to security...2022 October 24, Peter Walker, “Last morning in No 10 is straightforward – but what now for Liz Truss?”, in The Guardian
- Synonyms:
- induction, onstaffing, orientation
Also used as
onboarding is also the present participle and gerund of onboard.
Synonyms of onboarding
Forms of onboarding
| plural | onboardings |
|---|
Origin of onboarding
From on board + -ing, 1970s American management jargon.
Questions about onboarding
- What does onboarding mean?
- Onboarding means the process of bringing a new employee on board, incorporating training and orientation.
- What part of speech is onboarding?
- Onboarding is a noun.
- What is the plural of onboarding?
- The plural of onboarding is onboardings.
Words near onboarding in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: onboarding (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “onboarding.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/onboarding. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.