GoCertify Looks Back: Our 10 Most Popular Articles of 2020

Last week in this space we recapped GoCertify's Second 10 Most Popular Certification Watch newsletters of 2020. Today, as the countdown to 2021 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 pre-Colonial era satiric adventure novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift is 97,730 words long. So if you've been a faithful GoCertify reader and have taken in every article to appear on the site in 2020, then congratulations: You've accomplished the equivalent of reading Gulliver's Travels from cover to cover.

(Not only that, but we didn't make you put up with ridiculous place names like Brobdingnag and Balnibarbi, to say nothing of equally ridiculous character names like Glumdalclitch and Flimnap. Also, if you read Gulliver's Travels in 2020, you'd be trying to decode political and social satire that was written 300 years ago. We love a Swift wit as much as the next neoclassicist, but still.)

To clarify, all of these are articles that first appeared on the site this year. That is to say that we've considered 2020 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 Cloud Computing Certifications for 2020 — "The public cloud market in the United States is still dominated by the Big Three — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google — while Alibaba continues to expand its footprint in China." (by Reena Ghosh)

2) Six Hot Big Data Certifications for 2020 — "There is value in data. Enterprises that have the expertise to manage huge amounts of data, extract relevant information, analyze it, and derive insights about customers' unique needs and behaviors stand to gain." (by Nathan Kimpel)

3) The End of Microsoft Certification for Windows? — "After leaving Novell in 1994, it was increasingly clear that Microsoft was winning the server/network OS wars, and had already taken up a more-or-less dominant position on the desktop front, as well. Thus, I started developing MSCE training classes for the American Research Group (ARG, now part of Global Knowledge) in 1995 and 1996." (by Ed Tittel)

4) Six Hot Cybersecurity Certifications for 2020 — "Many organizations are grappling with a cybersecurity skills shortage. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that the number of vacant cybersecurity jobs will go up to 3.5 million by 2021." (by Reena Ghosh)

5) Six Hot Virtualization Certifications for 2020 — "In the past, it has often been easier and more reliable to run individual tasks on individual servers: one server, one operating system, one task. It was never easy to give one server multiple operating systems. or multiple enterprise applications." (by Nathan Kimpel)

6) Who Invented the Computer? Lord Kelvin   — "During his lifetime, he published more than 650 scientific papers and made contributions to the fields of electricity, geophysics, thermodynamics and telegraphy. In 1866, Queen Victoria knighted him for his work on the transatlantic telegraph project, officially making him 'Sir William.' " (by Calvin Harper)

7) The Increasingly Tricky Role of Microsoft Certified Trainers and Microsoft Certification Content Developers — "The appeal of building content, however, rather than teaching classes — either online or in the classroom — is that the content keeps working (and generating income) whether you are delivering to students or not. That's one of the reasons I launched my Exam Cram series way back when (1997), and why writing books was a major piece of my income generation strategy for many years." (by Ed Tittel)

8) The TechRepublic Top Certs for 2020 List Is On Point — "I think it would be valuable and useful to put the cloud players into a cloud category, and rank them independent of vendor or sponsor. It's hard to figure out, really, where players fit in a landscape that treats Google, AWS and Microsoft independently. That goes "double ditto" for VMware, Citrix, and Cisco, too." (by Ed Tittel)

9) The Past, Present, and Future of Cisco Certification — "The year was 1998. I was working at a steel mill in Sterling, Ill. My job title was design draftsman but I actually found myself doing a little bit of everything. Some of those tasks were populating and maintaining a database for all of our CAD drawings, installing printers, working with large format plotters, and even repairing company PCs." (by Dana Fellows)

10) Who Invented the Computer? Alan Turing — "Though his years at Bletchley Park had included a proposal of marriage and short-lived engagement to a colleague and fellow mathematician, Joan Clarke (later Murray), Turing was a gay man in a time when gay men were not just discriminated against, but actively criminalized under British law." (by Calvin Harper)