The Canadian Common CV (CCV) is the shared federal biographical-data platform every Tri-Agency applicant — whether applying through CIHR, NSERC, or SSHRC — uses to build the CV component of a grant, fellowship, or award application. Rather than formatting a separate CV for each competition, an applicant enters career data once into the CCV at ccv-cvc.ca, and each funding opportunity pulls a specific, agency-configured “template” (for example, NSERC’s Form 100) from that same underlying data to generate the formatted document reviewers actually see. This guide walks through the CCV’s structure with a fully filled-in, clearly labelled illustrative example, then explains what each part is for — and flags a real, currently-unfolding change worth knowing about before you start.
A change in progress: the CCV is being partly replaced by a new “tri-agency CV”
As of 2026, the CCV is no longer the only Tri-Agency CV format. CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC have jointly developed a separate, narrative-style tri-agency CV, capped at five pages in English (six in French), built around a personal statement, a description of the applicant’s most significant contributions and experiences, and a section on supervisory and mentorship activities — a deliberately different, less-tabular format from the CCV’s module-and-entry structure (SSHRC, Tri-agency CV). It is not a full CCV replacement yet: SSHRC currently uses it for a specific set of funding opportunities (including Destination Horizon Grants, the Imagining Canada’s Future Ideas Lab, Indigenous Capacity and Leadership Grants, Knowledge Synthesis Grants, Policy Innovation Partnership Grants, and SSHRC Impact Awards, plus Tri-agency Institutional Programs Secretariat opportunities such as the Canada Excellence Research Chairs program). CIHR has stated an intention to introduce it for the Project Grant competition beginning with the Spring 2026 competition, subject to delay if the community needs more time, and NSERC has targeted its 2027 Discovery Horizons and Arthur B. McDonald Fellowship competitions (NSERC news release). Outside those specific, named competitions, the CCV remains the required format — including for the programs CASRAI already covers, such as the Canada Postdoctoral Research Award and most NSERC Discovery and SSHRC Insight competitions. Always confirm which CV format a specific funding opportunity notice actually requires before you start — this guide covers the CCV, still the more common of the two as of this writing, with the narrative tri-agency CV noted here so you know it exists and isn’t a duplicate or a mistake if you encounter it on a specific competition.
The CCV’s structure at a glance
The CCV is organized into modules an applicant completes once; which modules a given funding opportunity actually requests (and in what order) varies by agency and program, but the recurring core includes:
- Personal Information — name, language skills, and contact details, entered for administrative purposes. Peer reviewers see only your name fields from this module, not the rest of your contact information.
- Education — degrees, institutions, and completion dates, in the applicant’s own entry order.
- Recognitions — prizes, awards, scholarships, fellowships, bursaries, and distinctions (such as dean’s honour roll or membership in a professional college), each entered with the awarding body, the competitive or non-competitive nature of the process, and the funding source (federal, provincial, non-profit, etc.).
- Employment and Affiliations — academic and professional appointments and institutional memberships.
- Research Funding History — prior grants and awards held, including role, amount, and period.
- Contributions — the largest and most consequential module, covering publications, presentations, and other research outputs. Entries here should be significant and relevant to the specific proposal and demonstrate leadership qualities and potential, not serve as an exhaustive lifetime bibliography; each sub-section has its own entry limit, and applicants are instructed to leave a sub-section blank rather than pad it with marginal entries.
Because the CCV is shared infrastructure across departments and agencies (not exclusively Tri-Agency), fields and character limits can vary by which template a specific opportunity uses — the Recognition Name field, for instance, is limited to 250 characters including spaces under common Tri-Agency templates. Always work from the specific funding opportunity’s own CCV instructions rather than assuming every field behaves identically across programs.
Illustrative worked example: a filled-in CCV excerpt
The example below is an illustrative composite created for this guide. “Dr. Priya N. Fontaine,” “Lakeshore University,” and every credential, award, and publication shown are invented for demonstration purposes only — they do not describe any real person, institution, or funded project. Use this to see how the modules fit together, not as a template to copy verbatim; your own entries, credentials, and history must be your own.
Personal Information
Family Name: Fontaine First Name: Priya Middle Name: N.
Language(s) of Correspondence: English
Current Position: Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Lakeshore University (fictional)
Education
| Degree | Institution | Field | Completion Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| PhD | Fictional Institute of the North (fictional) | Sociology | 2019 |
| MA | Lakeshore University (fictional) | Sociology | 2014 |
| BA (Hons.) | Lakeshore University (fictional) | Sociology | 2012 |
Recognitions
- 2023 – Early Career Investigator Prize (fictional), Fictional Canadian Sociological Association — competitive, non-profit source
- 2019 – Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award (fictional), Fictional Institute of the North — competitive, institutional source
Research Funding History
- 2021–2024: Co-Applicant, “Community data governance in resource towns” (fictional project title), SSHRC Insight Grant (fictional award), $187,000 (fictional figure, illustrative only)
- 2019–2021: Recipient, Canada Postdoctoral Research Award-equivalent fellowship (fictional, illustrative — shown for field placement only)
Contributions (excerpt — Publications)
- Fontaine PN. Data governance and consent in resource-extraction communities (fictional article title). Fictional Journal of Community Sociology. 2023;18(2):112–134.
- Fontaine PN, Okonkwo T. Participatory methods for institutional data-sharing agreements (fictional article title). Fictional Journal of Community Sociology. 2021;16(4):301–319.
(A real CCV Contributions module typically also includes presentations, reports, and other non-publication outputs; only a publications excerpt is shown here for length.)
Section-by-section notes: what reviewers are actually checking for
- Education and Employment establish trajectory and continuity — reviewers use these to sanity-check seniority and expertise claims made elsewhere in the application, not to evaluate individual entries.
- Recognitions carries real weight for track-record assessment, but only for entries with genuine signal — a long list of minor departmental recognitions dilutes rather than strengthens the impression a shorter, higher-signal list creates.
- Research Funding History is a disclosure and track-record module at once: it shows reviewers what the applicant has previously been trusted to lead, and it is also how agencies check for overlapping or duplicate funding requests across a research program.
- Contributions is where relevance to the specific proposal is judged most directly. As with the NIH biosketch’s Products section (see CASRAI’s NIH Biosketch Worked Example for a US-federal parallel), the instruction to include only significant, relevant entries is meant literally — a shorter list of clearly on-point contributions reads stronger to a review committee than a maximal list padded to fill every available slot.
CCV vs. NIH biosketch vs. UKRI R4RI: the same underlying problem, three different formats
The CCV, the NIH biosketch, and the UK’s Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI) all solve the same problem — letting a review panel judge an applicant’s track record in a standardized, comparable way — but they are not interchangeable documents, and none can simply be exported into another’s format. The CCV is entry-based and modular (discrete fields per module, reused across multiple funding opportunities through different templates); the pre-2026 NIH biosketch was narrative and page-capped, and NIH’s current Biographical Sketch Common Form/Supplement structure uses per-field limits instead; the emerging Tri-Agency narrative CV and UKRI’s R4RI both move toward the same page-capped, narrative-statement model. See CASRAI’s NIH biosketch vs. UKRI R4RI comparison for a direct look at that specific pair, and CASRAI’s guide on Canada’s Tri-Agency research funding system for how CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC fit together structurally.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Canadian Common CV (CCV)?
The CCV is a shared, federal, web-based CV-data platform used by CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC (and other Canadian funders, such as the Canada Foundation for Innovation) to collect standardized biographical and research-history data for grant, fellowship, and award applications, at ccv-cvc.ca.
Is the CCV the same as the new “tri-agency CV”?
No. The tri-agency CV is a separate, newer, narrative-style CV format that CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC are introducing for specific funding opportunities, distinct from the CCV’s module-and-entry format. As of this writing, most Tri-Agency programs still use the CCV; check the specific funding opportunity notice to see which format it requires.
Do I need a different CCV for each agency?
No — the underlying CCV data is entered once and shared; a given funding opportunity generates its formatted CV report from a specific agency-configured template drawing on that same data, so applicants don’t re-enter their history for each competition.
Can I copy content from my CCV directly into a different funder’s CV format?
Not directly as formatted text, but the underlying facts (dates, roles, funding amounts, publication details) should be entered consistently everywhere they appear across a CCV, a biosketch, an R4RI, or any other funder CV — discrepancies between formats are exactly the kind of inconsistency a reviewer or research office is likely to flag.
Where do I actually complete the CCV?
At ccv-cvc.ca, the CCV system’s own site, which also hosts current instructions and template-specific PDF guides for each participating funder.
Related CASRAI resources
- Canada’s Tri-Agency Research Funding System — how CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC are structured and governed
- Postdoctoral Fellowships in Canada: CPRA and the Banting Legacy — a program that requires the CCV
- Canada Graduate Research Scholarship (CGRS) — another Tri-Agency award using CCV-based applications
- CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship
- NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship
- SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship
- NIH Biosketch Worked Example — the US-federal parallel to this guide
- NIH Biosketch vs. UKRI R4RI — comparing narrative CV formats internationally
- Grants Management — cluster overview
