Heat Check

Have you ever been in a situation where you were expected to chitchat with another person but you didn't know what to say? Of course you have! We all have. As you probably already know, one safe and rather universal topic for such situations is the weather. No matter where you are, there is always weather happening there, and people are usually aware of its effects. There are even online tutorials to help you learn to converse about the weather.

In summer, naturally, it is generally easy to make small talk about how darn hot it is. And talking about heat is an excellent way to transition to other topics. We use heat as a metaphor to describe many other things. Workplace skills and certifications (especially IT certifications), for example, are often described as being either "hot" (which is good) or "cold" (which is bad). People frequently want to know what the "hot" certifications are.

(See how easy that was? We started out talking about the weather, and now we're talking about certifications.)

It's good to be aware of which certifications are considered to be "hot" at any given moment. If you're pursuing a particular career path, such a "heat check" can be helpful as an indication of what direction you should take with your continuing education. (We're big on that around here, as you may have noticed. Any tech career requires continual monitoring of the latest development and frequent devotion of time and energy to new learning.)

You should always be careful, however, to get the right information out of this or that estimation of what is "hot" in technology. A new article at GoCertify discusses in depth some of the important caveats to apply. For example, bear in mind that the pace of change in technology is sometimes dizzying. What is hot today maybe be old news tomorrow — be sure that today's "sizzling" cert has some staying power before committing to it.

One thing to bear in mind is that certain foundational IT skills may not be likely fodder for "hot" lists, but remain essential to the daily function and operations of thousands of businesses around the world. If all of the talk about "hot" skills is making you sweat, then maybe you should leave the trends to the hipniks and get in touch with the basics. Your career will always have a slow burn if you're handy with the IT essentials. Start today, and you'll have IT made in the shade no matter how hot it gets anywhere else.