What I wish I'd known about combining evidence across multiple employers

My career has spanned three organizations in the relevant period, and pulling evidence together across all three took more coordination than I planned for, mostly around consistency. Things that caused friction I didn't anticipate: my job title meant something different at each company even though the actual work was similar, which made the "leading or critical role" narrative harder to tell cleanly across employers without extra explanation. Getting reference letters required navigating relationships with people at a company I'd left on fine terms but wasn't in regular contact with anymore, which took longer than getting a letter from my current manager. And documentation standards varied — one employer had thorough internal records I could cite, another had almost nothing formal, which meant leaning more heavily on external evidence (publications, external recognition) for that period. What helped: writing a short, honest connective narrative explaining the progression across employers early in the process, rather than trying to make the petition body do that work implicitly through exhibit ordering alone. Once I had that throughline written down, it was much easier to see which employer-specific gaps actually needed filling versus which ones the overall narrative already covered.