Claude Certified Associate Foundations

About this course

The Claude Certified Associate – Foundations (CCAO-F) is Anthropic's entry-level, non-developer certification. It does not test coding or API trivia — it puts you in the shoes of an HR partner, a finance manager or a project lead and asks what the sensible thing to do with Claude is. This course is built domain by domain against Exam Guide v1.0 (60 items, 120 minutes, 720/1000 to pass) and grounded in Anthropic's current documentation on prompting, hallucination reduction, Projects, Artifacts, Memory, Skills, Connectors and the Usage Policy. Most lessons are taught as live diagrams — decision trees, comparison grids and mental models — because scenario judgment is easier to remember as a picture. Walkthrough lessons — building a Client Account Hub Project, connecting Google Drive and Gmail, anonymizing a spreadsheet — are drawn as annotated mock screens and flows you can reproduce in your own account. Inside: 31 videos across 9 sections (about 6 hours), 23 downloadable checklists, templates and reference cards, 8 section quizzes written in the exam's scenario style, and a 20-question Final Practice Assessment. This course is an independent study resource and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Anthropic.

What you'll learn

• Read CCAO-F scenario questions like an examiner and spot the safety-theater distractor in every item
• Write prompts that work using the six prompt layers, task decomposition and prompt chaining
• Identify hallucinations, inconsistencies and bias, and apply Anthropic's five verification techniques
• Decide when an output needs expert human review using a consequence-by-verifiability grid
• Choose between Haiku, Sonnet and Opus based on reasoning depth, volume and cost of error
• Pick the right feature — Chat, Projects, Research mode, Artifacts, Memory, Skills, Connectors — for the task
• Manage context windows: know when to restart, summarize or persist a conversation
• Score use cases, augment before redesigning, and communicate value and limitations to stakeholders
• Build and maintain a Claude Project with strong instructions, a knowledge base and connectors
• Apply data-sensitivity, privacy and Usage Policy rules, including anonymizing regulated data before upload
• Troubleshoot poor outputs with a symptom-to-cause ladder and optimize workflows for efficiency
• Register, schedule and sit the exam with a two-week study plan and multiple-response strategy

Requirements

• A Claude account (Free works for most lessons; a paid plan is recommended to follow the Projects and Connectors demos)
• Regular hands-on experience using Claude for everyday work tasks
• No coding, API or software development experience is required
• A copy of the official CCAO-F Exam Guide from the Anthropic Partner Academy (free)

Who this course is for

• Operations, marketing, project management, HR, education and communications professionals preparing for the CCAO-F exam
• Consultants and partner-firm staff who need the Associate credential for client work
• Team leads who want to roll out Claude responsibly and need a shared standard of practice
• Anyone who uses Claude daily and wants to move from casual prompting to professional discipline

Curriculum