Quantum Academy Launches 68 PQC and Quantum Courses, With Proctored Certification Exams

Disclosure: I founded Quantum Academy and teach on its faculty. It is operated by Post-Quantum Institute, a company separate from Applied Quantum, the consulting firm I also run. Some instructors work for both.

Quantum Academy, a new training and certification provider for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and quantum technologies, launched publicly on October 2, 2026 with 68 courses across six domains, from PQC migration to quantum sensing, and 11 professional credentials, nine of them earned by proctored, scenario-based exam. The Academy said it adds new courses every day.

The Academy’s first eight sessions, from October 1 to 16, sold out, including in-person classes in Amsterdam on October 1 and 2 and in Dublin from October 7 to 9. Those sessions began as Applied Quantum courses and were almost fully booked when they were converted into public Quantum Academy courses. The earliest sessions with places available begin on October 19, with live online prices from US$379 for a short industry session to US$8,499 for the six-week Certified Chief Quantum Officer (CCQO) Program.

Quantum Academy is a brand of Post-Quantum Institute, a Delaware corporation with no corporate link to PostQuantum.com despite the similar name. Its founder, Marin Ivezic, is the author of PostQuantum.com and also founded the consulting firm Applied Quantum.

Nine of the 11 Credentials Require a Proctored Exam

Quantum Academy issues 11 credentials across four tracks: Post-Quantum, Quantum Technology, Quantum Computing Security and Quantum Leadership. Nine require a proctored exam. The Academy distinguishes its credentials from course-completion certificates by requiring a supervised exam or an independently marked capstone.

Exams are closed book, multiple choice and scenario-based. The passing standard is set using the modified Angoff method and reported as 700 on a 100–900 scale. Under the Candidate Guide, which took effect on September 15, 2026, every sitting is online, unrecorded and supervised in real time over video by a Quantum Academy proctor who did not teach the candidate. The guide also sets out the rules for eligibility, retakes and appeals.

The other two credentials are assessed differently. The CCQO is earned by a capstone, a quantum strategy and three-year roadmap for a simulated multinational, which two assessors who did not teach the cohort mark independently. The Post-Quantum Certified Expert credential, PQCX, is awarded automatically to holders of three active post-quantum credentials.

Exam fees are US$599 or US$699, and a training-plus-exam bundle costs US$199 less than the two bought separately. For each exam-based credential, the Academy’s own training course is a prerequisite, though a candidate can apply for an exception based on prior experience before booking. Credentials are valid for three years. Holders renew them with 60 continuing professional education credits per three-year cycle, at least 15 a year, and a US$149 annual maintenance fee that covers every credential they hold, or by re-examination at US$399.

Successful candidates receive a digital badge and an entry in a public verification record at a dedicated .pro domain, such as pqcs.pro. The Academy states that its certifications are private professional credentials issued by Post-Quantum Institute and “not government-issued licenses, accredited academic degrees, or academic credit.” The Academy also states that earning a certification does not guarantee employment, promotion or any regulatory outcome.

Next Sessions and Dates

As of October 3, these were the first 12 sessions with places available on the Academy’s schedule. Most live online sessions run in one of two fixed slots, 07:00 UTC for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific (APAC), and 15:00 UTC for the Americas.

The CCQO Program runs for six study weeks, each built around a four-hour live session on a Saturday, with reading and capstone work between sessions. The first cohort meets on November 7, 14 and 21, December 5 and 12, and January 9, 2027. There is no session on November 28, and the December break is set aside for capstone work, according to the program’s event page.

Sessions that start by November 5, and the first CCQO cohort, will run as scheduled regardless of enrollment, the Academy said. Other public sessions need eight paying participants, counted 21 days before the start date, and if the Academy cancels one, each buyer receives a full refund and a credit toward another course at the same price or lower.

Live training for the exam-based credentials runs over four consecutive days of six hours each. Private team training is available for any course, online or at the client’s site, and is quoted on request through [email protected].

A Catalog of 68 Courses at Launch

The courses cover six domains: Quantum Security & PQC, Quantum Computing, Communications & Networking, Sensing & Metrology, Leadership & Strategy, and Quantum AI & Machine Learning. At launch, the Academy grouped its 68 courses into seven categories.

Each of 13 industries has a half-day overview and a full-day intensive: Financial Services, Payments, Insurance, Digital Assets, Legal & Professional Services, Healthcare, Pharma & Life Sciences, Energy & Utilities, OT & Critical Infrastructure, Telecommunications, Government & Defense, Cloud Providers and Automotive. The industry pages also list the quantum computing, networking and sensing courses relevant to each sector.

The Academy offers four formats: live online, in person, private team training and online on-demand. At launch the first three are running. On-demand courses, including the two free one-hour introductions, have not opened yet, and neither have memberships. Most course pages include 180 days of on-demand access with a live online or in-person booking. Where the on-demand version of a course is not yet published, the 180 days start on its publication date. For every paid course, the Academy awards a certificate of completion and issues a PDF course handbook after the training. Learners also receive a PDF of the course’s companion book at no extra cost, either Quantum Ready, Quantum Systems Integration or Quantum Sovereignty. Ivezic wrote the first two and co-wrote Quantum Sovereignty with Luka Ivezic.

On each course page, the Academy also provides a ready-made letter that a learner can use to ask an employer to approve and fund the course.

Instructors

Quantum Academy opens with eight instructors, and six more practitioners are going through its faculty selection process, the Academy said. It recruits instructors who combine deep expertise in a subject with experience leading large projects and organizations in that field, according to the Academy.

All eight hold or have held senior roles, and most have spent two decades or more in their fields, according to their faculty profiles. Half hold graduate degrees in physics, cryptography or quantum communications, three of them doctorates. Their careers include defense research laboratories, the applied research division of a global bank, consulting practice leadership at IBM, Accenture, PwC and KPMG, C-suite roles at financial and technology advisory firms, and industrial control systems work at Siemens.

Some instructors, including the Academy’s founder, also work at Applied Quantum. The faculty page lists current instructors, and the Teach with Quantum Academy page sets out how practitioners apply and how instructors earn rank.

My Analysis

Instead of the usual “My Analysis” section of the news article, I’ve written a longer, personal post about why I started Quantum Academy, who teaches there and the rules I intend to run it by. Applied Quantum has delivered hundreds of hours of private training to its clients, and I wanted that teaching in an independent company that can bring in outside experts as collaborators.

If you’re deciding whether to book, judge the training by its course content and its instructors. The checkable parts are on the site: the schedule, the course pages, the faculty page and the Candidate Guide. The credentials are a different matter. The supervised exams and the capstone marking by assessors who didn’t teach the cohort are what I’d point a skeptical employer to first, but these are new credentials and nobody holds one yet. Their reputation will depend on the quality of the assessments and on what the people who hold them go on to do.

Timing is the other reason I launched now. Under Executive Order 14412, US federal agencies have until December 31, 2030 to move their high-value assets and high-impact systems, other than national security systems, to post-quantum key establishment, and the people who will run those migrations have to be trained well before that date.