GoCertify Looks Back: Our 10 Most Popular Articles of 2017

Last week in this space we unveiled GoCertify's 10 Most Popular IT Certification Quizzes of 2017. Today, as the countdown to 2018 rolls forth, we're reflecting on our other major source of content, IT certification articles.

There are typically two new certification articles per week, which means that over the course of a year, we bring you about 100 new articles addressing various IT and certification topics. Articles tend to run between 700 and 1,200 words in length, so that's somewhere in the ballpark of 105,000 words of new content.

For the sake of comparison, the Victorian-era romantic tragedy Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront� is 107,945 words long. So if you've been a faithful GoCertify reader and have taken in every article to appear on the site in 2017, then congratulations: You've accomplished the equivalent of reading Wuthering Heights from cover to cover.

(Not only that, but we didn't make you put up with Heathcliff and all of that weird stuff where he gets Catherine Earnshaw so worked up over never marrying him that she dies, and then he's like, "Oops, sorry, here's a piece of my hair. I'll totes make it up to you by secretly manipulating your daughter into marrying her cousin, until she decides to marry her other cousin instead.")

To clarify, all of these are articles that first appeared on the site this year. That is to say that we've considered 2017 articles only. There's a vast library of older articles available, and many of those are still regularly read, but they get enough attention already.

Without further ado, the 10 most popular IT certification articles to appear on the site this year are as follows:

1) Why Every Project Manager Should Be PMP-Certified (Alex Bennett) — The PMP is like the Energizer Bunny of IT certifications. It's been around forever, and it just keeps on going.

2) Big Data, Security, Database Management: Oracle Offers IT All (Diana Gray and Eva Chase) — There are a huge number of Oracle certifications, so it can be hard to make sense of everything Oracle has to offer.

3) Five Hot Cybersecurity Certs for 2017 (Ahmed Badr) — Notice that we didn't say these are new hot certs. The IT industry is desperate to find skilled cybersecurity professionals. There's a reason the classics are red-hot all over again.

4) Do Data Scientists Really Have the Best Job in America? (Nenad Dumanovic) — Well, do they? And can we please see some data about that? (See what we did there?)

5) Microsoft Turns Over New Certification Leaf in 2017 (Ed Tittel) — Technically this article was published on the next-to-last day of 2016. In terms of attracting readers, however, it had to do all of its heavy lifting in 2017. And it addresses a 2017 topic, so, yeah, loophole.

6) Your CISSP Certification Blueprint is Ready (Nathan Kimpel) — Want to establish yourself as a cybersecurity expert? This is the credential to go after.

7) The Curious Case of MCSA: Windows Server 2016 (Ed Tittel) — Ho there, Watson! The game is afoot, and GoCertify's own Sherlock Holmes of Certification is on the scene!

8) We Are Living in the Age of Online Learning (Calvin Harper) — This article didn't even get to the site until October, and it still cracked the Top 10. Guess online learning really is hot stuff!

9) Find your Footing in Cloud Security with CCSK (Mike Chapple) — What's hotter than cloud certification and security certification? Cloud security certification, of course.

10) SDN is the Future of IT Networking (Ahmed Badr) — Here we have another late arrival that blossomed fast. This article didn't show up on the site until Nov. 20!