Claude Certified Associate
A free, independent guide to the Claude Certified Associate exam (CCAO-F): 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 business users working with Claude every day. All figures below are the official ones, published in the exam guide and shared across the four Claude exams.
- Exam code
- CCAO-F
- Price
- $99
- Questions
- 60
- Duration
- 120 minutes
- Scoring
- Scaled 100 to 1,000
- Pass mark
- 720
- Who it is for
- For business users working with Claude every day
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. Prompting & Task Execution14%
- 2. Output Evaluation & Validation21%
- 3. Product & Model Selection12%
- 4. Workflow Integration & Solution Design16%
- 5. Configuration & Knowledge Management12%
- 6. Governance, Risk & Responsible Use15%
- 7. Troubleshooting & Optimization10%
Official preparation
Anthropic publishes an official preparation course for this exam, Claude Certified Associate - Foundations. The course page is public and the course itself is free. Taking it, though, requires access to the Claude Partner Network, which in practice means working for a partner organisation.
We deliberately do not reproduce that 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. So we point you to it, note that it is free, and note that it needs partner access.
The useful part for everyone else is public: Anthropic lists three recommended prerequisites for that course, and all three are freely available to anyone in the public Anthropic Academy catalogue. They are Claude 101, AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations, and AI Capabilities and Limitations. The next section covers them, and no partner access is needed for any of them.
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 work seriously with Claude 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 Associate - Foundations exam page.
Start with the three official prerequisite courses. All three are public and free, with no Partner Network account required:
- Claude 101 - the orientation course on what Claude is and how to work with it.
- AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations - the full course hosted on anthropic.com: 12 lessons, roughly 3 to 4 hours, free, with a certificate of completion, released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.
- AI Capabilities and Limitations - where Claude does well, where it does not, and how to tell the difference.
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: Prompting & Task Execution (14%)
On Sentievo: Prompting, Prompt caching.
Domain 2: Output Evaluation & Validation (21%, the heaviest)
On Sentievo: Evaluation, Hallucination, Bias.
Domain 4: Workflow Integration & Solution Design (16%)
Domain 5: Configuration & Knowledge Management (12%)
This domain is about the product, not the API, so the developer documentation is the wrong resource here. Configuration and knowledge management live in the Anthropic Help Center rather than the build docs.
Domain 6: Governance, Risk & Responsible Use (15%)
The AI Fluency course frames responsible use with the 4Ds: Delegation, Description, Discernment and Diligence. Those four are the competencies. The aim they serve is working with AI in ways that are effective, efficient, ethical and safe.
On Sentievo: AI governance, Data privacy, Risk and safety, Alignment.
Domain 7: Troubleshooting & Optimization (10%)
Reducing latency really does sit under the strengthen-guardrails path in Anthropic's documentation, alongside reducing hallucinations and increasing consistency.
On Sentievo: Evaluation, Hallucination.
The wider Anthropic Academy catalogue
Beyond those three prerequisites, Anthropic Academy organises its free material into three learning tracks: Build with Claude, Claude for work and Claude for personal. The individual courses inside them change over time, so rather than list them here, check the current catalogue for what is available now.
Practise this exam
Reading gets you the concepts; questions tell you whether they stuck. Sentievo's practice follows the official CCAO-F domains and weights, and the first domain is free with no signup.