OCTOBER 1, 2023
Chris Green
Image: Credits floating with abstract shapes.
In every creative profession, your credits are your currency. They demonstrate a public record of accomplishment, the foundation on which your reputation rests. Consider how central IMDb.com has become to the film and television industry. Then consider that no comparable resource exists for creators.
The Creators Guild wants to change that, by building a database of verified, professional work. By creating a certified public record of work within the creator economy—independent of who owns that work or where it's hosted—we want to give creators an essential tool to establish their professional credentials.
One of our most active projects right now is the determination of professional standards that will allow work to qualify for CGA certification. Note the language there: It's work that will qualify for certification, not individuals. That work might be a Tiktok you shot and released in collaboration with a brand; it might be a social media campaign you managed; it might be a platform you built; it might be a mobile app you developed. There's a lot of ground to cover, which means that coming up with a comprehensive set of criteria for what will qualify as CGA-accredited work is no small task.
One point we have determined: CGA certification will be available to guild members and non-members alike. While it's tempting to make certification an exclusive benefit of membership, it's more important that our database cast as broad a net as possible. A bigger database is a better database, and if CGA accreditation is going to serve the creator economy the way that IMDb does the entertainment industry, we can't limit our data to the subset of creators who choose to join the CGA. Just so, our hope is that opening certification to non-members will pave the way to their becoming members in the future.
