Timelines and Professional Journeys in LM
In Lifecycle Management (LM), professional journeys function as the overarching containers that hold one or more timelines. This structure ensures institutions can view and manage faculty career progression as a cohesive, connected whole. A timeline organizes faculty events by rank within a series and are automatically created when a new rank is assigned through an appointment. Each event tile on the timeline provides key details, including appointment name, status, type, and timeframe. This article explains how timelines and professional journeys work in LM and how they impact faculty appointments. You’ll learn when timelines are created, how they behave with and without professional journeys, and best practices for managing events and exceptions.
Timeline Behavior and Rules
- LM automatically creates a timeline for the faculty member’s rank when a new appointment is added.
- Timelines stay visible on the faculty profile even after the appointment ends, providing a historical record.
- Each rank supports only one timeline. If a new appointment is added for the same rank, LM updates the existing timeline instead of creating a duplicate. New events linked to the appointment are added to the original timeline, ensuring a complete history of past and future activities.
Plan and Define Professional Journeys
Administrators create professional journeys within the series template, which establishes the ranks and corresponding events that structure a faculty member’s career path. This ensures timelines are consistent and aligned with institutional policies.
Once created, professional journeys can be applied to individual faculty members during appointment creation. Since a journey serves as the container for its timelines, you can either apply a specific timeline from within the journey or apply the full journey (including all rank timelines) in a single step.
- Navigate to the Series page and scroll down to the desired series to see its current progression of ranks.
We recognize that every faculty member may not follow a perfect or identical journey. This is why these are only templates that can be applied to reflect general events. For specific faculty events that do not fit standard templates, remember that you can add individual, unique events to a faculty member's profile after the appointment has been created.
Past events must be entered manually (or in bulk) while current and future events are added as they occur. LM will sequence them automatically by date. To ensure accurate timelines, events will not auto-start or end. Whoever is managing that faculty member will have the ability to adjust the status of events to confirm what events have actually occurred to reduce the likelihood of inaccuracies when reporting on faculty.
- Select the ‘Professional Journey’ tab under the desired rank to view any existing Professional Journeys. Click the +Add Professional Journey button to assign a new professional journey
- Identify a title and description for the professional journey. The title will appear on a faculty profile, while the description is for internal reference only.
The description is limited to 255 characters. This is internal information that will not appear on the faculty's profile page.
- Under the ‘Connect Ranks’ section, click the +Add rank button to select from the different ranks available as part of the associated series.
Ranks that are not in the same series can not be connected within a professional journey, however a series may incorporate ranks that do not connect with one another on a professional journey.
- Once the desired number of ranks have been added, be sure to reorder the ranks sequentially by Clicking and Dragging the ranks to create connections for upcoming events.
- Scroll to the bottom and click Save when finished. The professional journey will display with all the events mapped out and connected from rank to rank.
Updates to the series template automatically update the Professional Journey tab, but do not retroactively change existing appointments. Appointments remain tied to the template version applied at creation, preserving historical accuracy.
Additional appointments within the same journey do not create new timelines.
Applying a Professional Journey to an Appointment
When creating an appointment, you will have the option to apply the professional journey or not.
The scope of events on the timeline depends on whether a professional journey is applied:
No professional journey is applied
There is a 1:1 relationship between the timeline and a specified rank. Therefore the timeline focuses exclusively on the current rank tied to the appointment. In the example below, you can see how events are limited to the Assistant Professor rank, without any future ranks included.
Professional journey is applied
The timeline becomes a roadmap of career progression, showing current and upcoming events across every rank in the journey. The example below highlights how events flow from the current rank (Assistant Professor) to future ranks such as Associate Professor and Full Professor.
Tenure Track Example
For this example, the date when creating the appointments below is 1/22/26
Appointment without professional journey
Initial Appointment
- Appointment Start Date: 1/22/26
Appointment with professional journey
Initial Appointment
- Appointment Start Date: 1/22/26
Mid-Year Appointment
- Appointment Start Date: 1/22/24
In this case, LM identified that the first event for the Associate Professor rank has already passed by subtracting the Start Date (01-22-2024) from the current date (01-22-2026). Since two years have already passed, the timeline starts with the second event in the Associate Professor timeline.
FAQs
How can I update a faculty member’s timeline to reflect unique circumstances?
When an appointment is initially created, it follows the standard progression defined in the associated series template. However, real-world situations often require flexibility. To ensure the timeline accurately reflects a faculty member’s career path, you can add individual events or exception events directly from their profile.
- Individual events allow you to record unique milestones without altering the overall timeline (e.g., sabbatical leave).
- Exception events adjust the timeline by accelerating or extending future events (e.g., tenure clock extension or prior credit toward promotion).
These updates apply only to the selected faculty member and do not affect others in the same series or track, preserving both accuracy and fairness.
How does LM determine a faculty member’s year in rank?
When Should I Select “Year 0” vs “Year 1” for the First Event of a Rank?
When creating a faculty appointment, the system calculates the faculty member’s current year in rank by comparing the appointment’s start year with the current calendar year.
- If the appointment began this year, the timeline starts with the Year 0 event.
- If the appointment began last year, the timeline starts with the Year 1 event, and continues accordingly.
Professional journey events for the main rank are then applied from that point onward, ensuring the timeline reflects the faculty member’s current progression rather than always beginning at Year 0.
Year 0 events should only appear on the faculty member's timeline if the faculty member's hire year falls within the same calendar year as the Year 0 event, regardless of the academic year.
Determine the Correct Year for the First Rank Event
When configuring rank events within the series template you’ll need to specify ‘In which year and month does the event occur?’ You will want to consider when the first event of the rank starts for all faculty that this series will be applied to.
- Enter ‘Year: 0’ if the first event of the rank will start in beginning of the faculty member's first full academic year in the new rank.
- Enter 'Year: 1' if the first event of the rank will start in the spring of the faculty member's first full academic year in the new rank.
Consider when the start date of your appointments will be. For example, an appointment is created in the current calendar year, 2025:
The series template configuration at the top defines the Year 0 event as ‘Appointment’ and the Year 1 event as ‘Appointment, Review.’ When creating appointments, the system applies these template rules based on the appointment's start date.
- First example: Start date is in the current year (2025), so the system assigns the Year 0 event.
- Second example: Start date is in the previous year (2024), so the system recognizes that the appointment is now in Year 1, skips the Year 0 event and assigns the Year 1 event.
Why isn’t my faculty timeline populating?
Your faculty timeline may not be populating for a few reasons:
- No events left in the series: If all events in the series have already been completed or there are no future events, the timeline will not populate events.
- Appointment with the same rank already populated a journey: If an appointment with the same rank has already populated a journey, this may prevent the timeline from populating again.
- Journey not applied at appointment creation: If the journey was not applied when the appointment was created, it will not show up on the timeline.
Can someone have multiple journeys at once?
Yes, users can have multiple journeys, and these journeys can also be within the same series.
Can there be two active events in the same journey?
Yes, a faculty member can have two events in progress at the same time. These events would appear with an active, green label on the faculty member's journey with respective active statuses.
Can a faculty member be loaded onto a Journey without events?
Yes, you can add a faculty member to a Rank (with an associated Journey) that does not contain events.
Can I use a different month within the same year for an event?
Yes. If you need to adjust the timing of an event (such as a review or promotion) within the same year:
- Record the outcome of the review or promotion event as usual.
- Add a new event for the terminal year (the final milestone in the journey).
- Delete any subsequent events that are no longer relevant.
How should I track visiting faculty?
When a visiting faculty member returns under the same Unit, Series, and Rank Name, LM does not create a new timeline. Instead, the original timeline remains on the profile, and new events must be added manually. If the faculty member returns with the same Rank Name but under a different Unit or Series, LM generates a new timeline for the new appointment.
For faculty expected to advance through multiple ranks, apply the professional journey incrementally by linking the journey only when a new rank is assigned. This approach ensures timelines accurately represent rank progression without duplicating data.