GoCertify Looks Back: Our 10 Most Popular Articles of 2022

Earlier this month we recapped GoCertify's Second 10 Most Popular Quizzes and dished out two installments of the Most Popular Certification Watch newsletters of 2022. (The 10 Most Popular Quizzes were announced at the end of November.) Today, as the countdown to 2023 rolls forth, we're reflecting on our other major source of written content, IT certification articles.

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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.

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For the sake of comparison, the 1929 World War I romantic adventure novel A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is somewhere around 80,000 words long. So if you've been a faithful GoCertify reader and have taken in every article to appear on the site in 2022, then congratulations: You've accomplished the equivalent of reading, er, most of A Farewell to Arms — twice.

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(Look even your high school English teacher probably skips or skims the final two sections of A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway himself struggled to figure out how to finish what he'd started, as only most of the book is based on his actual experience driving ambulances in World War I. IRL, Agnes von Kurowsky — the woman depicted as Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms— said thanks but no thanks when our guy looked her up after the war.)

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(Think about how you would have felt. So did Hemingway, it would seem — he claimed to have rewritten the ending 39 times, and a 2012 edition of A Farewell to Arms actually dug up 47 alternate endings.)

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To clarify, all of these are articles that first appeared on the site this year. That is to say that we've considered 2022 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.

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

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1) Six Hot Cybersecurity Certifications for 2022 "CompTIA Security+ is a vendor-neutral foundational security certification that covers core technical skills in cybersecurity. This is the first security credential that many IT professionals earn when embarking on a career in information security." (by Reena Ghosh)

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2) Six Hot IBM and Red Hat Certifications for 2022 "IBM Cloud solutions continue to make up a significant portion of its annual business. The IBM Certified Professional Architect - Cloud v5 certification covers a full range of cloud computing subjects including storage, security, and data management." (by Aaron Axline)

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3) Six Hot Cloud Computing Certifications for 2022 "Currently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the market leader in public cloud services, with Microsoft Azure in second place and Google Cloud in third. Google's market penetration is still considerably lower than AWS and Microsoft Azure's, but it is popular among developers and its adoption is increasing." (by Reena Ghosh)

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4) Six Hot Developer Certifications for 2022 "The future for developers continues to look bullish in 2022 and beyond. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that employment for software developers, QA analysts, and testers is expected to grow by 22 percent over the current decade. This projected growth significantly outpaces the average for other BLS job categories." (by Aaron Axline)

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5) Business Insider Ranks the Top Coursera Certificates "To begin with, there's really only one outlier that falls outside a broad interpretation of "IT worker" — namely, the Intuit Bookkeeping item. Given that it comes from the market leader in bookkeeping, accounting, and tax prep software for small-to-medium-sized businesses, in the context of more than 6 million U.S. companies that fit the description, I totally get why it's on this list." (by Ed Tittel)

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6) Online Certification Exams in the Work-from-Home Era "Unbelievably, it seems that (ISC)2 is still figuring out how to proctor online exams, more than a decade after early pioneers and cert-sponsors have been making online exams routine. The organization's explanation is that they want to 'make our certification exams as accessible as possible while maintaining our security standards and the integrity of our certification programs.' " (by Ed Tittel)

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7) Who Invented the Computer? Mouse Men "Somewhat surprisingly, no further work to create any similar device was done until 1961 when Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013), an engineer at the Stanford Research Institute (“SRI”), conceptualized a device that would become the ancestor of the modern computer mouse. Engelbart was part of a team working on making interactive computing more efficient." (by Calvin Harper)

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8) The Emerging Trend Toward Skills-Based Hiring "It's no big stretch to recognize that IT certifications aim to provide a credible demonstration of skills and competencies, or to imagine employers making that connection themselves. Thus, I think the IT job market is trembling on the edge of another "certification boom," the likes of which we haven't seen since the mid-1990s through the early 2000s." (by Ed Tittel)

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9) Who Invented the Computer? Kubrick, Clarke, and HAL 9000 "Computers would continue appearing in films and television shows, but it wasn't until 1968 that a computer was given a starring role. In filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey — developed simultaneously as a screenplay and a novel by Kubrick and British author Arthur C. Clarke — the computer HAL 9000 is a principal protagonist." (by Calvin Harper)

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10) Small Sample Size Certifications: Salary Survey Leftovers, Round 2 "Respondent 1 is female, between the ages of 45 and 54, and lives in Connecticut (in the United States). She has an average annual salary of between $115,000 and $119,999. The highest level of education she has completed is a doctorate." (by GoCertify Staff)