GoCertify Looks Back: Our 10 Most Popular Articles of 2019

Last week in this space we unveiled GoCertify's 10 Most Popular Certification Watch newsletters of 2019. Today, as the countdown to 2020 rolls forth, we're reflecting on our other major source of written 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 2019, 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 2019 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) Six Hot Networking Certifications for 2019 (Nathan Kimpel) — Here we go again. Last year at this time, the top of the list was dominated the year-end "Six Hot" series. Looks like we struck a nerve again. You may have noticed, incidentally, that the "Six Hot" series for 2020 is already rolling off the presses.

2) Six Hot Microsoft Certifications for 2019 (Reena Ghosh) — Yes, the people have spoken. Clearly lists of six things are right there in the "sweet spot" of connecting with our readership. And if those things are "hot," well then, hoo boy, get out of the way and watch the clicks come flooding in.

3) Six Hot Cybersecurity Certifications for 2019 (Nathan Kimpel) — We did do more than three of these. There may actually have been six of them, come to think of it. (Hmm.) The others are all right there in the teens and twenties, but they didn't crack into the Top 10.

4) Department of Defense Expands List of Approved Baseline Certs (Ed Tittel) — Considered by many the ultimate seal of certification approval, inclusion on Uncle Sam's magical list of "Yes, We'll Hire You If You Have That Cert" is, as Hamlet once said, a consummation devoutly to be wished.

5) Credly Is the New King of Digital Badging (Aaron Axline) — If there were such a thing as certification Twitter, then all of the nerds there would get googly-eyed at the mention of digital badges. And if you want your certification program to badge digitally, then there's really only one partner to turn to.

6) Thoughts on Google Cloud Platform Training and Certification (Ed Tittel) — Google is among the last of tech's true titans to wade into the IT certification space, and its approach so far has been scattershot. It would seem, however, that people are eager to see the Big G succeed. They sure get a lot of attention from our readers.

7) Wireshark Certification Hits Fork in the Road (Ed Tittel) — Ed's initial take on then-recent developments in the Wireshark certification realm stirred up such a fracas that he had to write a follow-up! You'll find a link to that story when you click through to read this one.

8) Who Invented the Computer? Charles Babbage (Calvin Harper) — Charles wasn't the only guy responsible, of course, just the first to make a major contribution. We'll be carrying this series forward into 2020 and beyond, which should please the eager readers who boosted this installment to Top 10 status despite it's only appearing at the end of October.

9) Ten Interesting Under the Radar Certs (Ed Tittel) — It would be fairly easy to form the impression that IT certification consists of 40 or 50 leading credentials from a dozen or so sponsoring entities. In reality, there are hundreds of IT credentials out there. We could probably run an article like this every week for a year and not run out of new material.

10) Making Sense of the Great Cisco Certification Shakeout, Part 1 (Aaron Axline) — Speaking of leading credentials and well known certification providers, networking titan Cisco easily scored the Bombshell of the Year by announcing, in June, a far-reaching overhaul of its widely popular certification program.