← All certifications Claude Certified Associate – Foundations · CCAO-F

Use Claude well. Prove it.

Eight guided labs you complete in your own Claude account, plus a full practice exam. Written against Anthropic's official CCAO-F exam guide. No coding, no API keys, no notebooks.

Start Lab 1 → Take the Practice Exam
The Exam

What you're preparing for

The Associate credential validates that you can apply Claude to real business and productivity work with minimal guidance: choosing the right approach, judging whether the output is trustworthy, and knowing when to escalate to an Architect or Developer.

Exam code
CCAO-F
Questions
60 items
Time limit
120 minutes
Passing score
720 / 1000
Item format
Multiple choice & response
Validity
12 months

This certification does not test code. The official guide is explicit: no software-development or API experience is needed, and the credential is not intended for developers who build against APIs or design agentic systems. If that's the work you do, the Architect – Foundations track is yours. Every lab below is performed in the Claude product itself.

Guided Labs

Eight labs, one per exam domain

Each lab maps to one domain of the official blueprint and its published objectives. You'll work in your own Claude account throughout: building Projects, evaluating outputs, and making the judgment calls the exam actually measures. The capstone ties all seven domains together.

01
Prompting & Task Execution
Write prompts that work the first time, decompose complex requests into steps, and iterate deliberately. Adapt your approach across analysis, research, drafting, and brainstorming.
Domain 1 · 14% of exam
02
Output Evaluation & Validation
The heaviest domain. Catch hallucinations and fabricated citations, spot bias and inconsistency, fact-check systematically, decide when a human must review, and reshape output for its audience.
Domain 2 · 21% of exam — largest
03
Product & Model Selection
Choose between chat, Projects, research mode, and artifacts. Match Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus to cost, speed, and quality. Manage context limits: restart, summarize, or persist.
Domain 3 · 12% of exam
04
Workflow Integration & Solution Design
Map a real process, find where Claude genuinely helps, redesign the workflow around it, and communicate both the value and the limitations to stakeholders who will fund it.
Domain 4 · 16% of exam
05
Configuration & Knowledge Management
Build a real Claude Project: custom instructions, uploaded knowledge, and connectors like Google Drive and Gmail. Then keep it accurate as the underlying knowledge changes.
Domain 5 · 12% of exam
06
Governance, Risk & Responsible Use
Separate appropriate from inappropriate use cases, anonymize regulated data before it ever reaches an upload, apply your organization's AI policy, and reason about ethical implications.
Domain 6 · 15% of exam
07
Troubleshooting & Optimization
Diagnose why a prompt underperforms instead of guessing, adjust based on what the output actually shows, and tune a workflow for efficiency without sacrificing quality.
Domain 7 · 10% of exam
08
Capstone: Ship a Real Project
Build and hand off a complete Claude Project for a role you choose: marketing, operations, or project management. Configure it, evaluate its outputs, and document its guardrails.
All seven domains
Assess Yourself

Then test what stuck

✓
Associate Practice Exam
175 questions across all seven domains. Run a full 60-question exam simulation weighted to the real blueprint, or drill a single domain. Includes multiple-response items, scoring against the real 720 cut line, and a per-domain breakdown.
QR
Quick Reference
One-page cram sheet: the seven domains and their weights, model selection table, Projects vs. chat vs. research mode, the validation checklist, and the data-sensitivity decision flow.

Open Claude in a second tab

Every lab asks you to do the work in your own account. That's the point: this exam tests applied skill, not recall.

Start Lab 1 →