Why a Professional Journey entry needs dates
Understand the ATSReady Needs dates group, the month-year date format behind it, and how to fix an undated journey entry.
On this page
If a journey entry appears under Needs dates, ATSReady does not have a usable month-year date for that chronology entry.
Why ATSReady surfaces it
Undated chronology items are collected into a Needs dates group. Nothing was rejected: a date is optional when an entry is saved, and the group is a reading aid that separates the entries not yet eligible to be pushed onto a resume from the ones that are. An entry sitting there is stored and editable exactly like any other.
A resume import is the most common way to end up with a full group at once — Your import finished and it says 0 years of experience follows that case from the figure on Professional Identity to the fix.
Languages and Interests never appear in the group. They carry no date field, so there is nothing to add — Professional Journey categories is the full list.
What date format ATSReady expects
ATSReady normalizes resume and journey dates to these canonical forms:
YYYY-MMYYYY
Rendered date ranges are therefore month-and-year ranges, not day-level dates.
Which date the entry is asking for
The date fields are not the same in every category, so "add the start and end month" is only right for half of them.
| Category | Date fields |
|---|---|
| Work Experience | Start Date, End Date |
| Education | Start Date, End Date |
| Projects | Start Date, End Date |
| Extracurricular | Start Date, End Date |
| Certifications | Issue Date, Expiry Date |
| Publications | Publish Date |
| Patents | Filing Date |
| Awards | Date |
Publications, Patents and Awards are single points in time and have no second date to fill in. An entry in one of those leaves the group as soon as its one date is set.
I currently work here belongs to Work Experience alone. Ticking it is what marks a company as ongoing, and it is not the same thing as leaving the end date blank — no other category has it.
How to fix it
- Open the entry from the Needs dates group.
- Fill in the date field its category asks for, using the table above.
- Where the category has a second date, add it unless the entry is still open — and for Work Experience, tick I currently work here instead.
- Save the entry and recheck the group.