Lessons learned and shared from narrative CV training
Like many of you reading this blog, I am beginning the new year in a reflective mood.
Last year, myself and Claire Sykes, Head of Research Support, Faculty of Science at the University of Sheffield, rolled out a programme of training on narrative CVs across the University.
This training programme consisted of webinars (which I co-hosted together with a member of the University’s research support team) and in person, discussion-based workshops for early career researchers (which I prepared and presented, with logistical support from the research support team at the University).
Over the course of last year, several hundred staff and researchers across the University of Sheffield attended one of these webinars or workshops. Each was tailored to meet the specific needs of either STEM or AH&SS researchers, and each provided plenty of opportunity for discussion.
Some of the most in-depth discussions we had emerged from the four in-person training workshops that we held for early career researchers (two for STEM and two for AH&SS ECRs). As preparation for these workshops, ECRs were invited to submit a draft narrative CV for me to provide feedback on. This preliminary work provided the basis for the discussions we then had about how to structure, write and evidence a narrative CV, and about the opportunities and challenges that each module can raise for those writing a narrative CV for the first time. Several ECRs also kindly allowed us to share excerpts from their narrative CVs in the follow up workshop, and in subsequent webinars, to inform our discussions and to provide the much requested examples of how different modules can be written and evidenced.
We estimate that 100 researchers attended these in-person workshops, and around 600 the webinars, with hopefully even more benefitting from the supporting resources that came out of them.
So what did we learn from all of those we had the fortune to train, meet and discuss narrative CVs with?
Well, to begin with, we (myself and the dedicated team of research support managers that I worked with at the University of Sheffield) noticed that certain questions came up again, and again. And that when we went looking for answers to these questions, there was sometimes little available information to guide and inform our answers to them.
We also noticed a wide range of practice and understanding among those we trained and supported, concerning how a narrative CV should/could be written and how a narrative CV should/could be assessed.
And that when it came to first time assessors of narrative CVs, there seemed to be next to no publicly available information, training or guidance available to support them.
So which questions were often asked in our training sesssions?
Claire and I have shared some of the top ones below.
1. Where can I find a sample narrative CV from someone working in a similar discipline/ role/ career stage to me that will help me to work out how to structure my own narrative CV?
2. What does good evidence consist of for each of the four different modules and how much evidence do I need to provide? Should I include links to activities, outputs, collaborations etc, as evidence or is the description of what I did enough?
3. How much space do I have for a narrative CV and what restrictions might apply? How do I decide what to include from my traditional CV and what to leave out?
4. Will other funders use the same structure as that of UKRI’s R4Ri narrative CV template? Or will I need to write a different narrative CV for each funder and/or for each application?
5. How do I go about writing a narrative CV for a team? How do I decide who and what to include, and as an ECR, how do I ensure my contributions are fairly represented on a team-based CV?
6. Are universities also going to introduce narrative CVs for recruitments and promotions? Are other employers likely to as well?
7. How can I get support if my writing or language skills put me at a disadvantage when preparing a narrative CV? The narrative writing skills needed to prepare a narrative CV might present challenges for neurodivergent individuals applying for research grants. Have funders considered this?
8. Where can I find more information and resources to help me to convert my traditional CV to a narrative one?
Seeking answers to questions
In response to some of these questions, and in the absence of available information to guide us on how to answer, I reached out to UKRI, who shared with us some helpful information, which I thought it might be helpful to share and summarise below.
Does UKRI plan to provide examples of narrative CV?
UKRI currently has no plans to provide examples of narrative CV, so as to avoid creating expectations as to what a narrative CV should like for researchers from across a broad spectrum of diverse career paths. This makes sense to me if the goal of a narrative CV is to enable researchers to describe their contributions, activities, achievements and outputs in a much more flexible way than ever before.
However, I would argue that researchers don’t necessarily need whole CVs as examples to work from. A library of different sample modules that researchers can pick and choose from, to best suit their needs, might provide them with a much more valuable resource, and could be used to create training materials for assessors as well. Claire and I are starting to think about how we could provide such a resource and would love to hear from others who’d like to join this effort, to help secure funding for it. The University of Sheffield is also preparing narrative CV resources informed by this training programme and which will develop over time, with the aim of collating these by funder, scheme and/or career stage.
What does good evidence consist of for a narrative CV?
We spent a lot of time addressing this question during our workshops and webinars. Each module of a narrative CV requires different supporting evidence, but is the description of a contribution, skill, activity or output enough, or should supporting links be included as well? When a researcher is providing evidence to support how they contributed to the development of others (as in Module 2), are there GDPR implications to consider if they include, for example, verbatim feedback from a trainee?
When I took this question to UKRI, the response was clear, but not all of it matched the written available guidance.
UKRI explained that its new funding service does not accept the inclusion of any external links in the capability to deliver section, where researchers are asked to use a narrative format to answer the questions in this section. That means that if researchers are applying for UKRI funding, the evidence is the narrative account itself.
However, when we checked UKRI’s guidance on how to prepare a R4Ri narrative CV, this guidance currently states: ‘When referring to outputs such as publications, please provide these as a digital object identifier (DOI) which can be hyperlinked to the publication where possible. This will also help you to save space in the R4RI template.’
Researchers are looking - and asking - for clear and consistent guidance from funders on what their expectations are when it comes to evidencing a narrative CV. Should researchers include hyperlinks, persistent links to outputs, links to activities, positions and contributions, and if they do so, will assessors be required to check them?
Will UK research funders agree to use a common narrative CV template?
At the moment, two narrative CV templates are in use across the UK, and variations thereof. The two main templates are the Royal Society’s Resume for Researchers, and UKRI’s Resume for Research and Innovation (R4Ri). Each consists of four modules, covering broadly the same topics, but described using slightly different wording.
The Joint Funders Group (JFG) was established in 2021 so that funders could explore a shared approach to developing narrative CVs with each other. But little more seems to have been communicated since on whether funders plan to adopt a common format for narrative CVs.
Researchers are asking for guidance on this, bearing in mind the time it takes for them to prepare a narrative CV for each application, and the additional time it takes for assessors to assess a narrative CV relative to a traditional CV. It seems to me that funders should factor into their plans a commitment to reducing the time burden placed on researchers were each funder to ask researchers to prepare and/or assess a differently structured narrative CV.
Looking ahead
Narrative CVs seek to improve how researchers are evaluated for funding and jobs by enabling researchers to be both evaluated and rewarded for a much broader range of contributions, skills, activities and research outputs than were previously recognised, and across a wider range of career paths. In this context, narrative CVs are an important step towards improving the fairness and effectiveness of researcher assessment and towards developing assessment processes that better recognise what we want to value in research and researchers, including team work and collaboration, open research practices, and skills in supervision, mentoring and leadership. However, they are not a magic bullet, and are not without their shortcomings, which need to be recognised and accordingly addressed. As explained in an earlier report, narrative CVs risk amplifying pre-existing biases in the research system. Researchers also need appropriate and sufficient support and training to convert their traditional CVs to the narrative CV format, and assessors need support on how to assess them, and arguably more time as well.
Funders have a key role to play here. They can provide up to date and sufficient information on narrative CVs that is clearly signposted; they can listen and respond to the information needs of university research support / research manager teams, who are providing support on the ground; and they can provide information, support and training for their assessors on how to fairly and properly evaluate narrative CVs.
I would also remind funders of the key finding that emerged from the Tickell report on research bureaucracy, published in 2022 …
‘Unnecessary bureaucracy diverts and hampers research, and the work of individual researchers and research teams. Ultimately, it diminishes the returns from research funding.’
And encourage UK research funders to continue to work together on a broadly unified narrative CV format to avoid the need for researchers to write a differently formatted narrative CV for each application they prepare.
Author: Jane Alfred
ORCiD ID: Orcid.org/0000-0001-6798-0064
29th January 2024
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Claire Sykes for providing feedback on and additional information included in this post. The delivery of this training programme depended on the many, experienced research managers at the University of Sheffield, who helped with logistics, pointed researchers to available in-house support, and who helped to field questions in the Q&A sessions. It’s fair to say that while I developed and provided the training, keeping it up to date in a fast-changing environment, and rolling the whole programme out across the University, was very much a team effort. Claire and I could not have done it without the expert contributions of Joanne Chapman, Bethan Taylor, and Rebecca Robert and Lucy Bartrick, who all work as part the the Research Growth Team at the University of Sheffield.