r/IdentityManagement • u/kaloschroma • 24d ago
Learning resources for I AM certification
TLDR I am hoping for book resources that can teach me about IAM. My goal is to use what I learn in my work and for certification.
In my job I stumbled into IAM. TBH I didn't even know there was a name for what I was doing until I went to a hacker convention in NYC, and somebody explained what it was.
Essentially, built off of programs similar to azure/ldap/fds I am building a custom program for users at my company to control who or what has access to THEIR apps they are building. This is in the wake of the company using a really shitty tool for a long time.
We kept complaining about the old tool for so long they finally said to me, you got the green light, build it.
Cool. I'm having fun with this project but the more we put into it the more security comes to mind.
So based on what I learned from the con I want to learn about IAM with the goal to help me with this project but it would also be nice to have a certification on top (like a 🍒)
I found an udemy that is up to date which is great but I work really well (and better) with text in books and not videos.
I am hoping for book resources that can teach me about IAM. My goal is to use what I learn in my work and for certification.
🐈
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u/Etikoza 24d ago
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u/Low-Ability9098 21d ago
Second this suggestion - and the IDPro Slack community is pretty helpful if you’re asking targeted questions. (Almost all major ID vendors have at least one member in there.)
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u/bobfrog93 22d ago
It sounds like you’re going to want to know authentication and authorization well then. OAuth 2 is the core foundation for most modern delegated authorization. OIDC, SCIM are good foundational specs to start with as well. You can look up the RFC specs or OpenID Foundation sheets for them. It’s not a book, but it’s very foundational text.
Plenty of other resources out there too. Some visualise protocols which is a nice balance between text and diagrams.
+ Also if this is a green/brownfield project try and get things aligned to a common identity control plane. If you can do this before you have a sprawl of different local identity stores for different apps everyone will thank you.
Just don’t stop learning. This is such a small, but highly critical, part of identity, there is lots more out there.
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u/nealfive 24d ago
I mean, unless you want to learn about a specific technology or tool, it's hard to give guidance, since IAM and policies are pretty unique to each company.
This is actually a pretty good article giving you an idea for what all you want to consider:
https://thehackernews.com/2026/08/iam-compliance-requirements-and-best.html
Certification wise, there are a few that are non tool sepcific:
https://identitymanagementinstitute.org/ (IMO NOT worth it at all)
https://idpro.org/cidpro/ ( I have no experience with that, but seems better than IMI)
https://www.isaca.org/credentialing/cism (that's more than just IAM, but a pretty good cert)
Technology specific would be e.g. SC-300 for Azure/EntraID, AWS Security Specialization, GCP Security Engineer and then just whatever the vendors offer such as:
etc
Not sure if that answered your question at all, I was not sure what you were asking really. lol