Pluralsight currently has four different learning paths for aspiring and established IT security professionals.

Each learning path relates to a specific industry certification that you can gain.

In addition to the learning paths there are a couple of single courses for other industry certifications or standards: Microsoft MTA. This stands for Microsoft Technology Associate, and this is Microsoft’s introductory certification. You can find further details here. This is the most basic of the professional security certifications, so if you you have no previous experience of IT security, this is the easiest one to go for.

There is also a new course (Jan 2016) called Information Security Threats and Risks (ISO-IEC 27002). This covers a variety of risks including financial, medical, intellectual property, software code and customer information.

The learning paths are:

Systems Security Certified Practitioner

This path helps you to pass the SSCP® exam from ISC2. is a great way to mark your first milestone as a security practitioner. The SSCP helps you on your way to gaining the prestigious title of CISSP® – Certified Information Systems Security Professional.

This learning path covers eight courses

• The SSCP Courses and Exam Requirements
• Access Controls
• Security Operations and Administration
• Risk Identification, Monitoring, and Analysis
• Incident Response and Recovery
• Cryptography
• Network and Communications Security
• Systems and Application Security (not yet published)

All of these SSCP courses are presented by Jason Helmick

Ethical Hacking

This is a huge 20 course learning path. Currently most but not all of these courses have been published. This learning path is ideal if you wish to become a penetration tester, but the certification can also other options. The blog post Rundown of Ethical Hacker Career Options covers these.

Ethical Hacking focuses primarily on the offensive side of security but also covers how to mitigate against each category of vulnerability.

The Ethical Hacking series is presented by Troy Hunt and Dale Meredith

The course Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking with Kali Linux by Ghassan Khawaja is not part of this learning path but is a course you will probably also want to watch if you decide to take this learning path.

I aim to complete and give you the full lowdown on the Ethical Hacking path before the end of Summer 2016.

CompTIA Security+ 

This covers six courses and is the learning path that I am aiming to complete in January 2016. I am blogging my advice on it here.

Security+ covers a broad range of areas in IT security and is the first certification that opens up a path towards more specialized security expertise.

All of the CompTIA Security+ course are presented by Christopher Rees

Cisco CCNP Security

This can either be viewed as four separate learning paths, or one huge one, because there are four exams that you need to pass in order to become a Cisco Certified Networking Professional (CCNP). This is probably the most specialized and advanced of all the learning paths.

All of the courses to help you to pass the first exam, 300-206 SENSS Implementing Cisco Edge Network Security Solutions, are published. Many more courses are being worked on for the other three exams.

All of the CCNP courses are presented by Brandon Carroll