Occasionally, people whom I don’t know ask me for career advice in the field of taxonomies, but this is not easy to answer. For taxonomy work, career paths and prior experiences vary, employers span all industries and organization types, job titles and descriptions are not named consistently, and remote jobs are very competitive.
Two chapters in my book, The Accidental Taxonomist, 3rd ed., can help answer career questions, Chapter 2 “Who are Taxonomists” and Chapter 13 “Taxonomy Work and Profession.” However, I have some additional thoughts, which I am sharing here.
Varied taxonomy career paths
When someone asks me for advice on getting into taxonomy work, especially based on my own experience, I am somewhat dismissive, since no one will repeat my career path. I got into controlled vocabulary/taxonomy management work starting out as an indexer using the controlled vocabularies at a periodical article publisher. Not only is such a company rare and industry unusual, but now there are extremely few manual periodical/database indexers, since the task is increasingly done automatically (auto-tagging, auto-classification, text analytics, AI, etc.)
The following are some of the common paths towards taxonomy careers I have seen, and there are many others that are less common.
- Library/information science > cataloging > metadata
- Arts, photography, film, media > digital asset management > asset metadata
- Technical writing > technical content management, content strategy
- Marketing > web content management, content strategy
- Languages > linguistics > natural language processing > auto-tagging
- Languages > translation > terminology management
- Business management > knowledge management
Of course, in any of the above career paths, one does not have to change careers to become a taxonomist but could merely add taxonomy tasks to an existing career. This is especially the case of the following career backgrounds, in which people may add taxonomy work/projects to an existing technical role:
- Science/engineering > technical terminology and glossary management
- Computer science/data science > ontologies
- Information technology > content management system/SharePoint administration
Taxonomy job search challenges
It’s typical to search for taxonomy jobs on the major job search websites, such as LinkedIn and Indeed. But not all taxonomy jobs have “taxonomist” or “taxonomy” in the job title. They could have job titles instead for ontology/ontologist, information architecture/architect, metadata, content management/manger, data governance, etc. So, then a search could be on “taxonomy” in the job description rather than limited to the job title, but this results in many more irrelevant jobs that merely touch on taxonomies but don’t involve developing/managing taxonomies.
Taxonomist jobs are relatively rare compared to traditional jobs. Limiting a job search to a specific metropolitan area will yield few, if any, relevant results. The exceptions, where taxonomist jobs are more frequent tend to be Seattle, San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, New York, and Washington, DC. Taxonomist jobs in other countries exist but are less common than in the United States. Expanding a job search to all jobs mentioning “taxonomy” in the description, not just the job title, and expanding it to all of the United States will retrieve too many results, but this is a good approach to take in other countries. There is the added complication that “taxonomist” job searches can retrieve jobs postings for biologist-taxonomists.
Fortunately, many taxonomist jobs are remote. The downside to this, though, is that fully remote taxonomist job postings attract a high number of applicants, so the competition for such jobs is great. Where LinkedIn indicates the number of people who click on an application link on a job post, remote taxonomist jobs have received over 100 applicant clicks in just a couple of days.
A significant number of taxonomist jobs are temporary contracts, which are hired through recruiting firms. This is an option for someone not currently employed, but, obviously it’s not a good idea to leave a permanent job for a temporary one.
Taxonomy skills and skills acquisition
There is not a standard set of skills for a taxonomist, other than prior taxonomy experience. Positions may ask for additional skills in varied areas:
- experience with content management systems, digital asset management systems, or product information management systems
- familiarity with AI, machine learning, natural language processing, auto-classification, etc.
- experience working with large datasets
- experience designing ontologies and working with knowledge graphs
- technical skills with using SPARQL, SQL, and Python
Furthermore, positions may also ask for experience with specific taxonomy management software or specific subject domain knowledge (e.g. finance or healthcare). As a result, it’s rare for one applicant to meet all the experience and skills required. Applicants understand this and may apply anyway.
Taxonomy jobs and the skills expected in such jobs vary. Thus, to become a highly competent taxonomist generally requires experience from multiple different employers. I have learned a great deal having done different kinds of taxonomy work for different companies. It can be difficult to get the first taxonomist job, though. The best approach is to obtain taxonomy work, such as through a project, while in a role that is not a dedicated taxonomist. A lot of taxonomy work is done as part of a job that has other duties.
However, a single taxonomy project as part of a job is often not enough experience to jump to a dedicated taxonomist position. Some training to round out one’s knowledge and to fill in the gaps is highly beneficial. In addition to the information in my book, The Accidental Taxonomist, I teach various taxonomy training workshops.
Coming up next, I will teach a full-day in-person workshop “Connecting Users to Content through Taxonomies: An Introduction to Taxonomy Design & Creation” on Tuesday, April 29, 2025, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm in Philadelphia, as a pre-conference workshop to the Information Architecture Conference (with separate registration, not requiring full conference attendance).