Have you heard the good news? In 2025, Canada’s major research funder, the Tri-agency  - home of your favourite funders, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) - is moving away from the more-or-less universally derided Canadian Common CV to a new, narrative format CV, called the “tri-agency CV”. This new CV format will be rolled out for Tri-agency competitions over the next year, starting with the current SSHRC Impact Awards competition. If you are planning to apply for upcoming Tri-agency competitions, make sure you’re reviewing the funding opportunity description to check and see what type of CV you should be using in your application materials. In this blog post, we’ll dive into what narrative CVs are, what the tri-agency is looking for in a narrative CV, and share some resources for developing your own narrative CV. 

What is a narrative CV? Why is it a move towards responsible research assessment? 

Effectively, a narrative CV is a selective, descriptive, and highly contextual summary of your accomplishments, skills, and experience. Your narrative CV tells the story of your academic career, in your own words. But it’s more than just a biography: it’s a thoughtfully constructed, tactical illustration of your most significant achievements, where the examples that you offer your reviewers are the ones that are most impactful and relevant for a particular funding opportunity. Narrative CVs are “an opportunity for applicants to describe the quality, originality, and impact of their past and current research in relation to their disciplinary norms, context-specific methodologies and epistemologies, and labour or outputs that may not be readily visible in a traditional academic CV” (University of Winnipeg, 2024). 

By adopting a narrative CV structure, the new tri-agency CV is designed to prioritize “written descriptions of an applicant's research contributions, allowing users to highlight a wide range of research outputs and describe their career trajectories in more detail. This format values societal research outcomes, such as influence on policy or mentorship, alongside more traditional research outputs like publications” (CIHR, 2025). This means you will no longer be rewarded for sharing an exhaustive list of all your publications, but rather, you are encouraged to highlight your most impactful work across your career, which might include knowledge mobilization projects, non-academic outreach, or development of highly-qualified personnel (HQP). 

At SFU Library, we’re excited about this change as it fundamentally shifts the emphasis of the CV from a traditional, list-style document that implicitly favours the quantity of your publications, to an emphasis on narrativizing the quality of your contributions. And it asks reviewers to see their roles differently as well, to consider what research excellence and research impact means in broader contexts. Funding competitions that use narrative CVs are often “accompanied by guidelines for evaluators and awareness campaigns for responsible research assessment” (Bordignon, 2023). 

How do I put together the tri-agency CV? 

This new CV format has 3 sections: 

1. Personal statement 
   Why are you well suited for your proposed role? 
    
2. Most significant contributions and experiences
   What are your most important contributions or experiences that are relevant to this application? And what evidence can you point to?
    
3. Supervisory and mentorship activities
   How have you mentored or trained future generations?

If you are writing in English, you can have up to 5 pages; 6 pages in French. There is a template available, alongside an FAQ page with advice and guidance for applicants that clarifies what kind of information should be included in each of the sections above. This recent article from University Affairs, “How to write a narrative CV” walks you through how you can structure your content for each of the 3 sections, with specific advice about how and what to emphasize, the length each section should be, and how early career scholars might approach this task. 

The first time you need to craft a narrative CV, it might feel awkward or uncomfortable. You might feel like you’re boasting about your accomplishments, or leaving out key information. Offering context and description to some (but not all) of your career highlights, so that you can tell the story of the impact and influence of your research is the goal of a narrative CV, so give yourself time to work through these feelings. Review the application instructions so you know exactly what information you’re meant to include. If you’re worried about leaving things out, you can make it easy for a reviewer to find your full publication and employment history by creating and updating your ORCID, Google Scholar, or Linkedin profile. Get some feedback on your draft by asking a trusted colleague, grants facilitator, or writing specialist for their support. You’ve got this! 

Additional resources for writing a narrative CV

Concordia University shared the slides from a workshop on “Crafting a Compelling Narrative CV” that outlines practical guidance for how to scope your narrative CV to a particular funding call. 

The advice shared in the University of Winnipeg’s “Guidance for Narrative CVs for Canada Research Chair Applications” is highly transferable beyond CRC competitions, and has some good prompts for how to distinguish research excellence/innovation/impact/creativity. 

Western University Library’s guide to Narrative CVs points to a couple of resources, that, while not specific to the Canadian funding context, still offer helpful guidance: 

• the University of Dundee’s workbook on “Writing a Narrative CV” offers guiding questions and examples that you may find helpful as you structure your document. 
• the University of Oxford’s resource “Narrative CVs: a Guide for Applicants” contains a number of templates and examples.