Claude Certified Associate – Foundations (CCAO-F)

Learning plan

About 22 hours of focused study, split into 5 phases. Pick your weekly pace and the timeline adjusts.

Estimated finish: 3 weeks

What the exam covers

Source: official exam guide. Weights can change, so check before you start.

Before you start

• Eligibility: only staff at Claude Partner Network organizations can take this exam. Registration goes through the Anthropic Partner Academy
• Regular use of Claude (claude.ai or Claude for Work) in your job. No coding or API experience is needed
• A Claude plan that includes Projects, so you can practise configuration

1. Week 1 · 5 h

   Prompting, product features and model choice

   • Write prompts with role, context, task, format and constraints, and break a large request (e.g. a market analysis) into steps
   • Adapt prompting for analysis, research, drafting and brainstorming tasks, and iterate on a weak first draft
   • Pick the right surface (chat, Projects, Research, Artifacts) and model tier (Haiku for fast high-volume drafts, Sonnet as the default, Opus for hard reasoning)
   • Know when to restart, summarise or persist context as a conversation gets long

   Use: Claude 101 (Anthropic Academy) · AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations (Anthropic Academy)

2. Week 1 · 5 h

   Evaluating and validating output (largest domain)

   • Spot hallucinated specifics such as citation numbers, statistics or quotes, and verify them against the primary source before sharing
   • Check outputs for completeness, internal inconsistencies and bias, and decide when human review is mandatory
   • Rewrite one output for two audiences (an executive summary vs a detailed team brief) and choose between an artifact, inline text or a table

   Hands-on: Ask Claude to summarise a recent regulation or policy document with section references, then check every cited section against the source and log how many were wrong or imprecise.

   Use: AI Capabilities and Limitations (Anthropic Academy)

3. Week 2 · 6 h

   Projects, knowledge sources and workflow design

   • Set up a Claude Project with custom instructions and uploaded knowledge, and keep both current as source documents change
   • Connect and manage connectors such as Google Drive and Gmail, and know what data each exposes
   • Map an existing team process, mark which steps Claude augments or replaces, and explain the value and limits to a stakeholder

   Hands-on: Build a Project for one recurring task you own (e.g. weekly status reports) with instructions, a style example and two reference documents. Run it on three real weeks of input and refine the instructions until the outputs need only light edits.

   Use: What are Projects? (Claude Help Center) · Introduction to Claude Cowork (Anthropic Academy)

4. Week 2 · 3 h

   Governance, responsible use and troubleshooting

   • Anonymise or remove regulated personal data before upload when policy requires it, rather than relying on telling Claude not to retain it
   • Classify use cases as appropriate or inappropriate under your organisation's AI policy, and know when to escalate to a Claude Developer or Architect
   • Diagnose a poor output (missing context, vague format, wrong model, overloaded conversation) and fix it
5. Weeks 2–3 · 3 h

   Sample questions and review

   • Work the three official sample items and explain why self-reported confidence is never a validation step
   • Re-read the blueprint and self-rate each of the 29 objectives, focusing on Output Evaluation (21%) and Governance (15%)

   Use: CCAO-F official exam guide (PDF) · CCAO-F prep path (Anthropic Partner Academy)

You're ready to book when…

• You have a working Project with instructions and knowledge that you use weekly
• You can name the right model tier and product feature for five different business tasks
• You verify every factual claim bound for an external or compliance audience by habit
• You answer the official sample questions correctly and rate every blueprint objective 4/5 or higher

Exam tips

• The exam is 60 items in 120 minutes with a pass mark of scaled 720/1000, and the score report breaks results down by domain.
• New exam content takes effect December 7, 2026, with updated guides on November 17, 2026.
• Renewal after 12 months is a free, non-proctored assessment if you renew on time. A lapsed credential means retaking the full exam.