Professional Certificate in Identity & Access Management

What you will be able to do

• Explain identity, accounts, credentials and entitlements precisely
• Choose authentication methods by real strength, including phishing-resistant options
• Design role models that avoid role explosion and enforce least privilege
• Explain SAML, OIDC, OAuth 2.0 and SCIM correctly and know when each applies
• Run the joiner-mover-leaver lifecycle and access reviews auditors accept

What is inside

6 modules, 30 lessons. Each module ends in a graded quiz and most carry an assignment.

1. 01

   Identity and Access Fundamentals

   Why identity and access management exists and what it prevents, the precise difference between an identity, an account, a credential and an entitlement, how least privilege and need to know drive real access decisions, how authentication, authorization and accounting divide the work, and the four domains of the discipline plus the people who run them. Taught through Lakeshore Health System, a 4,000-employee hospital network with clinicians, contractors, students and rotating staff.

   5 lessons · 15 quiz questions

2. 02

   Authentication

   What each authentication factor really proves, how passwords fail in practice, how to write a password standard on National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-63 principles instead of legacy folklore, how to rank multi-factor methods by phishing resistance, and how to handle biometrics, sessions, and shared clinical workstations. Taught through Lakeshore Health System, a 4,000-employee hospital network with clinicians, contractors, students, and rotating staff.

   5 lessons · 15 quiz questions

3. 03

   Authorization and Access Models

   How authorization decisions are actually made, and how to design them. Covers discretionary, mandatory, role based, attribute based and policy based access control and when each fits; role engineering that avoids role explosion; what entitlements really look like inside directories, clinical applications, databases and cloud platforms; segregation of duties and toxic combinations; privileged versus standard access; and least privilege as a working practice rather than a slogan. Taught through Lakeshore Health System, a 4,000-employee hospital network where blocking the wrong access can hurt a patient.

   5 lessons · 15 quiz questions

4. 04

   Directories, Federation and Single Sign-On

   How directory services actually work, from the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and Active Directory through Entra ID, and how federation joins them to the rest of the world. You will learn the identity provider and service provider relationship, what SAML, OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 are each genuinely for, the benefits single sign-on delivers and the risk it concentrates, and how the System for Cross-domain Identity Management automates provisioning across your own applications and your partners. Taught through Lakeshore Health System, a 4,000-employee hospital network staffed by clinicians, contractors, students and rotating staff.

   5 lessons · 15 quiz questions

5. 05

   The Identity Lifecycle

   Joiner, mover and leaver as the spine of identity work: provisioning at hire, birthright versus requested access, the transfer problem and access creep, deprovisioning timeliness and orphaned accounts, and the populations that never appear in a payroll system. Taught through Lakeshore Health System, a 4,000-employee hospital network staffed by clinicians, contractors, students, locums and rotating staff.

   5 lessons · 15 quiz questions

6. 06

   Access Governance and Your IAM Career

   How identity work gets governed, proven, measured, and turned into a career. You will design access reviews that reviewers actually engage with, produce audit evidence for identity controls in a regulated hospital, choose identity metrics that drive decisions instead of decorating a dashboard, recognize and close the identity findings that recur in almost every audit, read the identity tooling landscape by category rather than by logo, and build the portfolio and skills that move you from identity analyst to engineer to architect. Taught through Lakeshore Health System, a 4,000-employee hospital network with clinicians, contractors, students, and rotating staff.

   5 lessons · 15 quiz questions · assignment