By Dr Rachel Herries, Research Culture Manager
How can research leaders make Narrative CVs accessible to researchers? And how can we ensure the effort put in has more value than ‘just a CV’?
Research Leaders and Career Conversations
As research leaders (Line Manager, Supervisor, or Principal Investigator) career conversations with your team are an integral element of your role. While you are not expected to be a Careers Adviser to your researchers, there is an expectation that you will support and encourage them in their career development and in pursuing their next career venture. There is huge value in having meaningful and productive career conversations with your researchers – done well, it builds trust, and strengthens your partnership. Some ideas for your consideration and adoption are:
- Making space and time for honest Career Conversations
- Encouraging Career Development and Exploration
- Fighting the perception of Failure
- Recognising the Importance of Values and the Value in Diversity
A relatively recent addition to the list of career topics that your researchers may be coming to you with are ‘Narrative CVs’. You might be thinking What is a Narrative CV? How do I write a Narrative CV? What do I use it for? And ‘How can I support my researchers when I myself have limited experience of this CV format?’
The first thing to remember is that Narrative CVs (note: ‘Résumé for Researchers’ and ‘Résumé for Research and Innovation’ are types of Narrative CV) are new, the sector is still in a period of uncertainty, exploration, and reflection – which from a positive perspective is generating conversations, resources and research on Narrative CVs and their value.
Narrative CVs: in context
A Narrative CV is simply a form of CV that uses a narrative style to explain the ‘why’ ‘who’ and ‘how’ behind the ‘what’. They are one part of the movement to improve research culture and reform research assessment. Originally developed by The Royal Society in collaboration with the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), they were created to support the evaluation of individuals’ varied contributions to research, moving away from an overreliance and focus on metrics, towards a culture that champions and demonstrates a commitment to fair and transparent research assessment practices.
The culture change ambitions set out in the Government’s Research and Development (R&D) People and Culture Strategy paper (2021) suggests that the adoption of Narrative CVs will broaden the range of experiences and accomplishments that can be recognised. Narrative CVs allow activities beyond publication record and grant income to be recorded and recognised, providing a more rounded picture of an individual’s career, their achievements and overall contribution. UKRI (the largest public funder of UK science) stated that this new approach to CVs would “enable people to better demonstrate their contributions to research, teams, and wider society”.
Put simply, think of the Narrative CV as a format that is more ‘open minded’ and so more inclusive to all the contributions you have made.
To illustrate, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)’s version of the Narrative CV (the Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI)) consists of four modules that aim to showcase you as an all-rounder:
- Contributions to the generation of new ideas, tools, methodologies or knowledge
- The development of others and maintenance of effective working relationships
- Contributions to the wider research and innovation community
- Contributions to broader research/innovation-users and audiences and towards wider societal benefit
Feeling daunted?
This format signals a big change in style, and it requires some personal reflection on how you work. You may not be used to considering how you build and maintain good relationships, or your personal impact on your research community.
Additionally, conversations with researchers and PIs reveal:
- Confusion about what information should be shared and in which module.
- Researchers don’t feel like they have all the skills and all the achievements to meet the requirements of a Narrative CV. Linked to…
- Concern about this format favoring a certain career path or more established career stages.
My first recommendation is don’t try to reshape a traditional Academic CV into a Narrative CV. They are different tools, with different writing styles. Instead, go ‘beyond the list’ Bordignon et al (2023) and think of the Narrative CV as more akin to a Cover Letter. Telling the story of ‘why you’.
My second recommendation is to take your time to think, to consider and unpick the ideas, and perhaps talk them through with others. Writing in this style isn’t the straightforward listing of outputs and income you may be used to. But it is a much more interesting, and indeed validating, conversation to consider the importance, significance, impact, and outcomes of your research, and of your actions as a researcher.
How can Research Leaders support researchers?
Thinking about the two ideas I offer above, you can (1) make time to talk it through and share ideas and feedback, as a group or one-to-one and (2) refocus your team on to the idea of quality, not quantity, and (3) help to surface and articulate their added value – their impact on others and the working culture, their leadership, mentorship, collegiality, sustainability, and innovation (see the UKRI image linked above for more ideas).
What is being strived for is a culture change regarding what is important in research, and what we value. The Narrative CV is a tool for thinking and consideration of what we are here to do, and how, as much as it is a document.
Questions to consider as a research leader:
- Are you sharing the full picture of how you have progressed, the successes, the failures, the full broad and varied contributions that make up your research experience?
- Do your researchers see the need to move beyond a long list of publications as their achievement?
- As a (like it or not) role model, are you adapting to and adopting this change in how researchers are evaluated, to lead the way?
More than ‘just a CV’
It’s easy to associate Narrative CVs with specific grant and fellowship applications, as ‘another new requirement from the funders’. Did you know that some universities are also adopting them for recruitment to academic positions as an elevation and replacement of the traditional Academic CV?
But the preparation and submission of an application, which is often a time pressured and stressful experience, doesn’t have to be the first time you and your researchers explore and use a Narrative CV as a development tool. You can use a Narrative CV template as the framework for career reflection and an approach to complete a gap analysis of their skills, expertise and experiences, encouraging them to create a career development plan well before the extra pressure of submitting an application appears.
The same template could support preparation for their/your Personal Development Review (PDR) or Promotion application. These processes also both require us to set our successes, contributions and achievements in context – and importantly, if done correctly, require us to look beyond numbers of publications and grants secured.
Try the format also when supporting interview preparation. When I have provided advice on Narrative CVs or delivered a Narrative CV workshop – the advice I’m providing echoes that of the feedback I’d be providing in a mock interview or in a Fellowship interview training session: asking researchers to provide the ‘why’, tell the story, spell out the evidence, give specific detail. Getting them to practice articulating this verbally will strengthen their confidence in showcasing their achievements.
Why not try encouraging your researchers to:
- Map out all of their wide-ranging activities and achievements – then, get them to ask you, their peers, and colleagues to add to this list. Encourage them to think about their achievements in the broadest sense possible.
- Add the detail, provide specific evidence to support a claim – why is each activity or achievement relevant? Why is it significant? What’s the context for impact? The evidence can be quantitative (X readers, X citations, X participants, X invited talks, X mentees) or qualitative (first to achieve, innovative method, tenacity in the face of challenge, striving for inclusivity, role modeling new best practice, advocacy, impact on mentees or supervisees).
- Allocate these achievements under the specific Narrative CV modules. For each module ask them to consider what’s their most important point – what do they want the reviewer to remember? If this is for a specific funding call, which points are most relevant to the call?
- Adapt the STAR approach – Situation, Task, Action, Result – apply this storytelling technique to each experience or contribution. Encourage them to write in a first-person voice and to clarify their specific contribution when working in teams.
- Look for the gaps and areas for development and to strengthen their Narrative CV. Discuss how they can gain experience to address the gaps?
In doing this quality thinking separately, and together there are benefits to Supervisors and PIs too. Not only for our own Narrative CVs; it also helps us as managers to consider what we value when it comes to working with others. Perhaps you already have thoughts arising about how you can recruit and develop more rounded researchers?
The Auditorium: a research culture and researcher development blog 
I appreciate this very helpful post, but it leaves one question unanswered: what does “narrative style” mean?
The original choice of “narrative” in the early days of this genre as an antonym for “bullet points” has proven infelicitous in my experience. It leads writers to do things based on their interpretation of “narrative.”
To many people “narrative” that means “story,” which means 1) chronological ordering 2) change over time 3) a developmental arc and sometimes 4) rousing writerly moments. But this new sort of CV might be some of those things, but not all the time and not for all of the people.
I think it’s better to say it’s an “authored” CV, in the sense that you make authorial choices about what to include, how to arrange it, how to amplify certain things, and how to comment on and provide context for items. Yes, the traditional CV was also authored, but the palette of choices was restrictively small. The new form allows you to comment on the information itself. In that sense, it’s a meta-CV. Or an annotated traditional CV with the bullet points of the original erased.
It is also important to watch for dynamics of cultural evolution in the processes of genre formation. The first generations of narrative CV writers, when they applied for funding, made a range of structural and stylistic decisions. But only the decisions that the winners made were passed on to the next generation, via people like me who provide proposal development support to writers. We used those winning proposals as examples, and over time those decisions are getting baked into the form.
One view might be that this winnowing process is bringing us closer to what the narrative CV as a genre was always intended to be. But another view is that we’re losing touch with the full range of possible rhetorical moves that a narrative CV could be, and in so doing losing the full potential of the form.
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