Claude Certified Architect - Professional
A free, independent guide to the Claude Certified Architect - Professional exam (CCAR-P): what it covers, the official Anthropic course, and the public resources you can study right now without Partner Network access.
These exams require your employer to be in the Claude Partner Network. Check whether you are eligible first.
The exam at a glance
For senior architects leading enterprise Claude deployments. All figures below are the official ones, published in the exam guide and shared across the four Claude exams.
- Exam code
- CCAR-P
- Price
- $175
- Questions
- 63
- Duration
- 120 minutes
- Scoring
- Scaled 100 to 1,000
- Pass mark
- 720
- Who it is for
- For senior architects leading enterprise Claude deployments
The 7 exam domains, by weight
The percentages are the official domain weights: they tell you where the questions are concentrated and where your study time pays off most.
- 1. Solution Design & Architecture17%
- 2. Claude Models, Prompting & Context Engineering13%
- 3. Integration19%
- 4. Evaluation, Testing & Optimization16%
- 5. Governance, Safety & Risk Management14%
- 6. Stakeholder Communication & Lifecycle Management14%
- 7. Developer Productivity & Operational Enablement7%
Official preparation
Anthropic publishes an official preparation course for this exam, Claude Certified Architect - Professional, alongside a public exam page and the full partner course library. The course pages are public to read; enrolling requires Claude Partner Network access, which in practice means working for a partner organisation.
We deliberately do not reproduce the course's lesson list or Anthropic's descriptions of it here. That curriculum is Anthropic's work; our rule is to reference and link to official material, never to reproduce it.
In our own words, the course is about owning a production Claude system end to end: designing it, integrating it, governing it, and then defending those design decisions to the stakeholders who fund and approve them. That last part, arguing for your architecture in front of the people who sign it off, is unusual for a technical exam, and it shapes a whole domain of its own (see Domain 6 below).
Anthropic lists six recommended prerequisites for the course: Claude 101, Claude Code in Action, AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations, Building with the Claude API, Introduction to Model Context Protocol, and AI Capabilities and Limitations.
Learning this without partner access
The certification is gated, but the skills it tests are not, and the exam domains are a good map of what it takes to lead enterprise Claude deployments whether or not you can sit the exam.
The official exam page on the Partner Academy is public to read, even though registering there is not: the Claude Certified Architect - Professional exam page.
The prep courses sit on the partner portal, but the same ground is reachable through public routes that need no Partner Network account. The Anthropic course catalogue lists them with lecture counts and lengths, among them Claude 101, Building with the Claude API, Claude Code in Action, Introduction to Model Context Protocol, and AI Capabilities and Limitations. AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations is hosted free on anthropic.com. Several of the same courses are also on Coursera, an alternative route for anyone who prefers that platform.
One public starting point applies to every exam: the free Claude Partner Network learning path, on the public catalogue rather than the partner portal, which Anthropic describes as the first step toward unlocking certification. It needs no partner access.
Domain by domain
For each exam domain, the public official resources come first, then the matching Sentievo concept pages. The Sentievo links reuse the same domain-to-concept map that powers our Study Plan Generator.
Domain 1: Solution Design & Architecture (17%)
Domain 2: Claude Models, Prompting & Context Engineering (13%)
Domain 3: Integration (19%, the heaviest)
On Sentievo: MCP, Tool use, Messages API.
Domain 4: Evaluation, Testing & Optimization (16%)
On Sentievo: Evaluation, Prompt caching.
Domain 5: Governance, Safety & Risk Management (14%)
On Sentievo: AI governance, Risk and safety, Data privacy, Alignment, Security.
Domain 6: Stakeholder Communication & Lifecycle Management (14%)
This is the one domain with no official public resource to point to. The developer documentation does not cover communicating with stakeholders, because there is no docs page for it: it is a consulting skill, not a technical one. That is an honest gap, and it is exactly where our AI Consultant role guide, below, is the relevant material instead of a concept page.
On Sentievo: the AI Consultant role guide.
Domain 7: Developer Productivity & Operational Enablement (7%)
On Sentievo: Claude Code, Agent Skills.
Practise this exam
Reading gets you the concepts; questions tell you whether they stuck. Sentievo's practice follows the official CCAR-P domains and weights, and the first domain is free with no signup.