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The United States (US) government spends a considerable amount of educational funding annually on career development interventions for secondary school students. However, no common terminology, definition and organisation of these initiatives exist in the professional literature. This creates difficulties for communication between practitioners, policymakers, and researchers, and for quality research and program evaluation. A research team from the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education carried out a study to address this problem. Its aims were to: (a) identify a comprehensive list of career development interventions that take place in US secondary schools; and (b) create a taxonomy of the identified interventions. A comprehensive list of 44 interventions was compiled and then the interventions were rated on five variables (time, mode, control, place, size). The ratings were then grouped empirically by means of cluster analysis to produce a four-cluster solution. The four clusters of career development interventions were titled: (a) work-based interventions; (b) advising interventions; (c) introductory interventions; and (d) curriculum-based interventions.