Make a Career Timeline

A career timeline puts your working life on one date axis: the jobs you have held, the degrees and courses you finished, the certifications you earned, and the projects worth naming. A resume lists those things one after another. A timeline also shows how long each one lasted and what ran alongside what, which is the part a reader otherwise has to work out for themselves.

People build one for a portfolio site or a job search, for a performance review or a case for promotion, for a graduate school or fellowship application, or simply to see the shape of the last ten years.

What to include

Keep it to the things a reader would care about, and let the dates do the rest:

• Roles. One event per role, not per employer. Two jobs at the same company are two events, and the second one starting where the first ends is what makes the promotion visible.
• Education. Degrees, diplomas and any course long enough to have a start and an end.
• Certifications and licenses. Useful on their own, and more useful when the timeline shows you kept them current.
• Projects and side work. The freelance contract, the open source project, the volunteer role. These often overlapped with a job, and the timeline is what shows it.

Leave out the roles that no longer say anything about you. A career timeline covering fifteen years reads better with twenty events than with sixty.

Give each thread its own layer

Your roles, your education and your certifications are separate threads that run at the same time, so put each one on its own layer. Try one layer for work, one for education and training, and one for projects.

Click the Add Layer button above the timeline to create each one. If you started from the Simple layout, its empty "Events" layer is removed when you add your first layer, so there is nothing to rename. The other layouts start with two or three layers called "Layer", which you can rename by clicking a name in the list below the timeline. Each layer can have its own color, so the threads stay easy to tell apart.

When you add an event, choose its thread from the Layer menu.

Enter the dates you actually have

Most of a career timeline is date ranges, and you rarely need the exact day. Preceden accepts a year on its own, such as 2019, or a month and year, such as March 2019. You can also type the whole range into the start date field and Preceden splits it for you: 2019 - 2023.

For the job you have now, set the end date to Present, and the bar runs up to today without you having to come back and update it. Supported Date Formats covers everything else Preceden reads.

Mark the moments that stand out

Some things in a career are a single date rather than a stretch: the day a certification came through, an award, a book or paper published, a talk you gave. Leave the end date blank and the event marks that one moment.

For the two or three dates that matter most, open More Options in the event dialog and check Make this event a milestone. A milestone takes a start date only, and Preceden draws it as a vertical line spanning the full height of the timeline, so it reads across every layer at once.

Say what you actually did

A job title alone rarely earns an interview. Every event has a Notes field that accepts Markdown, which is where the two or three results from that role belong: what you shipped, what you grew, what you were responsible for.

You can also add one image to an event, such as a company logo, a product screenshot or a photo of the work, which turns the timeline into something closer to a portfolio.

Sharing it

Save the timeline as a PDF to attach to an application, or share a link to send it to a recruiter or a manager. If you keep a personal site, you can embed the timeline on it, and the embedded copy picks up your edits to the original. The one thing it does not adjust on its own is its height, so update that in the embed code as the timeline grows.

New timelines are private until you change that, so nothing is visible while you are still putting it together. Adjust Timeline Visibility explains each option.

The free plan allows up to 10 events on each timeline and includes every export, which is enough for a short career timeline or a first draft of a longer one. Exports on the free plan carry a small Preceden logo, and our paid plans remove it and lift the event limit.