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I am planning to apply for a faculty position almost straight out of my PhD. While my CV generally looks very good for my career stage, I have no record of securing external funding. However, I have a ongoing (significant) grant application and I expect a a decision regarding the grant soon after the application deadline for the faculty position.

Is it acceptable to list ongoing grant applications on the CV in this case? I fear that I might need to justify a failed grant if I do not get funding.

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It is fine to list it, but I'd suggest factoring it out into a section titled something like "Work in Progress".

Whether you need to worry about explaining a failed grant application is a judgement call. You might have some information about likelihood or not. But most grants are competitive, which fact people understand.

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  • To add to that, it is helpful to prepare a brief explanation of your work for these grants. If you are rejected, you can explain what you learned from that experience, and if you are awarded the grant, that is even better.
    – Nathan Gavenski
    Commented 6 hours ago
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My answer is US-centric and my discipline is Statistics.

Yes, you should absolutely list any grant experience on your CV. Be clear about the status: I like to use "In Prep", "Pending", "Awarded", "Not Awarded".

Regarding "I fear that I might need to justify a failed grant if I do not get funding.", this is the complete opposite of the attitude that you should have. Committees will be looking for evidence that you will be able to get funding in the long term. The best way to show that you're serious about acquiring funding is to submit proposals. Everyone is aware that being awarded grants is 1) really difficult 2) very random. In my experience, having a grant submitted which was not awarded is viewed as a very positive thing. It is not a "failed grant": once you have a project description, you can improve and resubmit in the future. The people who get lots of funding over their careers submit many grants and have many of them go unawarded.

Even having multiple unawarded grants would still be viewed positively. Yes, presumably, if you had submitted 100 proposals and they were all rejected, that would look weird. But so long as you are taking the proposals seriously, it is essentially not possible to have this problem early career.

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