10+ Highly Rated Cybersecurity Courses to Take This Year

Cybersecurity demands professionals in the field stay up to date with what's happening around them because the stakes are high. Organizations across sectors see the cost of breaches rising year after year as bad actors refine their tactics.

(See the 7 Skills Cybersecurity Professionals Should Learn in 2023.)

The work and constant need to remain engaged can feel unrelenting, often taxing, but it's also what excites many analysts, engineers and practitioners about this line of work.

These professionals don't waiver from the challenge. They welcome the opportunity to learn something new, which can give them a leg up on threats or bad actors, while diversifying their unique skill sets. The security of their clients or employers depends on their knowledge to protect people, data and resources.

But what are security professionals learning? Which certifications or skills are they after? Even more important, which classes did they find truly helpful?

Cybersecurity professionals who train with Skillsoft can rate the course. Learners often base their ratings on several factors, like instruction, engagement, overall credibility and rigor, and more.

The courses below stand out from the rest as being some of the highest rated at Skillsoft, according to end-of-course survey results.

(You can gain access to them all for free by starting a trial of Percipio. Learn more about that here.)

This course will help those studying for the Certified Ethical Hacker exam learn about the main responsibilities of an ethical hacker at work. The focus, however, is on vulnerability assessments: what they are, how to carry one out, and the tools that will aid you along the way.

Learners who took the course favored it for the presentation of material and overall organization of the class, in addition to learning more about the subject itself. Here's another popular course from the CEH Channel: CEH v11: Web Application Hacking & Login Attacks.

For those preparing to sit the CEH v11 exam, here's another that's worth your while. This covers why and how cloud services have been susceptible to security issues and provides instruction for how to reduce risk using common controls.

Much like its predecessor for the v10 prep, this course still covers the foundations of cloud computing that ethical hackers must know, but also delves into containers and technologies like Docker.

Professionalism and integrity should be at the very core of a penetration tester's mission to expose vulnerabilities and report them. This course emphasizes the importance of integrity as a penetration tester and how to maintain a legal, ethical approach to this work.

Another popular choice in the CompTIA PenTest+ sequence, this course focuses on social engineering, the term used for the psychological manipulation bad actors use on their victims.

Bad actors use social engineering tactics to trick information out of people in order to access and steal data. This courses illustrates the journey a bad actor may take to carry out schemes and describes the various methods one could encounter, like phishing and vishing, tailgating and badge cloning.

This course covers the best practices of penetration testing, shows the tools to perform tests, and teaches the types, stages and methods used to carry out testing. As learners progress through this 16-video course, they uncover more of the nuance of penetration testing, its importance to exposing known or unknown vulnerabilities and more.

The purpose of this course is to teach cybersecurity analysts how to detect malicious activity and does so through a series of videos that demonstrate how to use investigative tools, provide instruction on installation, and walk learners through concepts like steganography. It's also one of 16 courses that help prepare learners for the CompTIA's Cybersecurity Analyst+ exam.

This bootcamp helps prepare advanced cybersecurity professionals to sit the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) exam. It's broken up into five parts, each running roughly three hours. The sessions move fast to cover the eight domains of CISSP.

After going through the course, many learners lauded the instructor for his real-world examples and ability to teach the breadth of this material in digestible ways. One learner shared this feedback:

"The instructor provides nice real world examples and presents the CISSP content in a digestible way. Engaging instructor."

A part of a series of prep courses for ISACA's CISA, or Certified Information Systems Auditor, this course teaches learners how to properly gather, handle and store digital evidence so that it's admissible in court.

The instructor teaches about how the chain-of-custody laws may impact evidence gathering. Learners also see first hand how tools like Kali Linux can help them.

While this course is a few years old, many learners still rate it highly for its easy-to-follow flow and applicable material. However, you can also find a more recent bootcamp to help prepare to the CISA exam here.

Those starting their careers in programming will find this course helpful as they build software from the ground up. This course focuses heavily on the Unified Modelling Language (UML), a standard visual language used to show how software works.

The instructor, computer expert Chuck Easttom, also teaches about Systems Modelling Language (SysML), which is similar to UML but can be applied more broadly. "You'll see just how effective these tools can be," Chuck says.

This is your introduction to security testing methods. This course teaches programmers how to conduct tests, track bugs and work with security metrics. What's more, it offers a framework for testing that can be tailored to the programmer's work style and preference.

Cybersecurity professionals sometimes struggle to balance the demands of work with the need to stay on top of the latest developments in their field. Because of this, it's imperative that when they make time to train, the material and instruction meet their expectations and needs.

For these reasons, cybersecurity teams and professionals need a dependable training curriculum to build the skills that will make the greatest impact at work and in their careers.

Further Reading: Skillsoft interviewed T-Mobile Cybersecurity Training Manager Adam Gwaltney to learn how to support cybersecurity professionals and improve training adoption. Read that interview here.