Taxonomist, Harvard Business School Publishing, Brighton, MA
Posted August 25, 2016
As part of our strategic focus on search optimization, we need a taxonomist to help the Higher Education group leverage an extensive set of product metadata to continually improve our ability to surface them to academic customers. The taxonomist acts as an internal expert on cataloging business terms from an academic perspective and translating that into findability for instructors searching for course materials on the HBP Higher Education website. The role supports a pedagogy-based Higher Education (HE) marketing approach by ensuring accurate and updated taxonomy terms for product metadata, organized to drive search enhancement.
This position requires broad knowledge of terminology and concepts in the quantitative and qualitative business disciplines and 3 – 5 years’ familiarity with organizing information for the web. Bachelor’s degree or higher preferably in a field related to Information Science, Library Sciences, or Instructional Design. Interest in/experience with pedagogical needs of business faculty a plus.
Key responsibilities:
- Maintain deep knowledge of academic business-related terms to serve evolving business instructor teaching needs.
- Ownership and regular maintenance of complete academic-focused business term taxonomy, including establishing and managing processes for ongoing updates.
- Extend the Higher Education taxonomy to organize product information with an eye to findability of content on the Educators web site.
- Understand what metadata is stored in the index of Endeca, the Higher Education web site search engine, and continuously refine in collaboration with the Web Product Marketing Manager
- Analyze taxonomy data related to products, items, usage, etc. to provide insights to the marketing/web team and drive search enhancement strategy and decisions.
- Work with internal stakeholders to understand taxonomy needs and priorities, from optimizing for customer-facing issues on the web site to collaborating with the Content Operations team which enters metadata for new content
- Be part of a data governance team, including maintenance of a standards-based controlled vocabulary to mesh with universally-understood terms
- Help define and implement taxonomy optimization strategies
- Be a line of contact to taxonomists at Harvard Business School, to standardize taxonomies and approaches whenever possible
- Be able to communicate with peers and the Higher Education management team effectively and clearly.
- Bachelor’s degree or higher, preferably in a field related to Information Science, Library Sciences, or Instructional Design.
- At least three years’ experience creating, extending, and maintaining taxonomies
- Solid general knowledge of all areas of business and management disciplines, terminology, and topics.
- Customer focus.
- Strong business writing, communication, and presentation skills.
- Proactive, self-starter who can also work well as part of a team.
- Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively and to balance multiple priorities.
- Strong organizational skills, with attention to detail in a fast-paced environment.
- A demonstrated commitment to quality work and excellence.
- Bonus: previous Information Architecture or User Experience role.
- Bonus: Experience using product analytics and A/B testing to optimize experiences.