CCAO-F prep, foundational
Claude Certified Associate - Foundations
Use Claude safely and effectively for business, research, analysis, and productivity workflows.
9 lessons2 practice examsFree diagnostic
Exam access. Who can sit the exam: as checked on 9 August 2026, Anthropic limits registration to people at Claude Partner Network organisations with a partner-company email. Check current eligibility on the official page before you pay or schedule.
The official exam
- Questions
- 60
- Time
- 120 minutes
- Fee
- US$99
- Passing score
- 720 on a 100-1000 scale
- Valid for
- 12 months
- Format
- Multiple-choice and multiple-response
- Delivery
- Proctored online or at a test center
As published by Anthropic in exam guide 1.0 (July 2026); checked 9 August 2026. Read the official exam guide
Who it's for
Operations, project, sales, marketing, finance, support, research, and other knowledge-work professionals. No software-development experience is required.
- Three to six months using Claude or a comparable AI assistant in real work
- Experience reviewing AI output before sharing it
- A practical understanding of hallucinations, context limits, and data sensitivity
What the exam covers
- Prompting and Task Execution14%
- Output Evaluation and Validation21%
- Product and Model Selection12%
- Workflow Integration and Solution Design16%
- Configuration and Knowledge Management12%
- Governance, Risk, and Responsible Use15%
- Troubleshooting and Optimization10%
Practice exams
Original questions in the official format, timed like the real thing, with a breakdown by exam domain and an explanation for every answer. Start with the diagnostic.
- Associate Foundations Diagnostic14 questions, 25 minutesFree
- Associate Foundations Full Mock60 questions, 120 minutes
Lessons
- 1Study the Decisions, Not the VocabularyA certification blueprint is a map of decisions a competent practitioner can defend. Treat it as a list of terms and you will study the least useful part of the exam.
- 2Choose the Smallest Surface That Can Carry the WorkProduct selection is architecture at knowledge-work scale. The wrong surface can make correct output stale, unreviewable, or needlessly expensive.
- 3Spend Capability Where Failure Is ExpensiveModel selection is not a ranking exercise. It is an allocation problem across quality, latency, context, and cost.
- 4Turn a Request Into a Testable ContractA strong prompt does not merely describe what to write. It makes success observable before generation begins.
- 5Put Each Fact in the Right Kind of ContextContext is temporary attention. Knowledge is maintained evidence. Memory is continuity. Caching is reuse. Mixing them creates confident stale answers.
- 6Validate the Claim, Not the ConfidenceFluency is presentation quality. Validation is evidence that the output can safely do its job.
- 7Put Authority Around CapabilityA model can produce an answer without having permission to see the data, make the decision, or take the action.
- 8Design the Handoff Before the AutomationA workflow is not complete when Claude finishes. It is complete when the next person can verify, decide, act, and recover.
- 9Ship a Week of Work, Not a Perfect PromptYour capstone is a governed decision workflow: sources in, claims checked, human authority preserved, and state handed off.
Study plans
14-day focused plan14 days, 7 hours a week
- Days 1-2: diagnose and learn the product map
- Days 3-6: prompting, context, and validation
- Days 7-10: workflows, governance, and troubleshooting
- Days 11-12: complete the capstone
- Days 13-14: full mock and targeted review
28-day steady plan28 days, 4 hours a week
- Week 1: product selection and prompting
- Week 2: context, knowledge, and validation
- Week 3: workflow design and responsible use
- Week 4: capstone, mock, and weak-domain review
Go deeper in the Academy
- Prompt Engineering (Phase 11): Build prompt structure and iteration from first principles
- Context Engineering (Phase 11): Understand context limits and deliberate context assembly
- LLM Evaluation (Phase 11): Turn quality judgment into repeatable tests
- Guardrails (Phase 11): Layer responsible-use controls around model behavior
- Bias and Representational Harm (Phase 18): Recognize and evaluate harmful output patterns
Katalock's Claude certification prep is independent study material based on Anthropic's public exam guides. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or authorised by Anthropic, does not contain live exam questions, and cannot guarantee a pass. Practice scores are raw percentages. They are not Anthropic's 100 to 1,000 scaled score and can't predict an official result.