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CCAO-F is the business-user credential in Anthropic's Claude certification programme. It is aimed at people who use Claude as part of their everyday work rather than building software against the API - consultants, analysts, project and operations people, marketers and delivery leads.
The largest domain is not prompting. It is Output Evaluation and Validation at 21% - knowing when Claude is wrong, how to verify it, and how to refine until the output meets a business requirement. No coding is required anywhere in the exam.
Target role: Business and knowledge workers.
Anthropic publishes the domain weightings below. They are the most reliable guide to where study time belongs.
Evaluating Claude responses, identifying errors or weaknesses, verifying information, refining outputs, and judging whether output meets a business requirement.
Incorporating Claude into business processes, selecting appropriate workflows, and designing repeatable Claude-assisted processes.
Responsible AI practices, risk identification, appropriate human oversight, and data and information handling.
Creating effective prompts, structuring tasks, breaking complex work into manageable steps, and iterating to improve results.
Selecting the appropriate Claude product and model for a task, and the capability, cost and performance tradeoffs involved.
Claude Projects, knowledge sources, context management, and configuring Claude for recurring work.
Diagnosing poor results, improving prompts and workflows, and resolving common Claude usage problems.
Registration is currently gated. Candidates generally need to be employed by an organisation participating in the Claude Partner Network, have access to the Anthropic Partner Academy, use a recognised company-domain email address, and be at least 18 years old. Personal email addresses generally cannot be used. Final eligibility is determined by Anthropic.
CCAO-F does not currently count toward Claude Partner Network tier eligibility. If partner tier is the goal, the Developer and Architect credentials are the ones that contribute.
The programme is role-based rather than a single ladder. Architect Foundations is not a prerequisite for Architect Professional — the two are separate credentials and you can sit Professional first.
No. There is no coding anywhere in the CCAO-F exam. It is written for people who already use Claude in their day job, and the largest domain is Output Evaluation and Validation at 21%, which is about judging whether an answer is good enough to act on.
Most candidates expect prompting to dominate, and it does not. Prompting and Task Execution is 14% of the paper. Output Evaluation and Validation is 21%, so the exam spends more time on catching a wrong answer than on writing a good prompt. Study in that order.
$99 USD, paid directly to Anthropic. Organisations in the Claude Partner Network may pay less depending on partner level. Training Camp does not sell the exam, so you book and pay for it with Anthropic rather than through us.
720 on a scaled range of 100 to 1,000. That is not the same as getting 72% of the questions right, and Anthropic does not publish a raw score conversion, so treat any practice test that claims a 72% threshold with suspicion.
120 minutes for 60 questions, which is about 2 minutes per question. Budget roughly 135 minutes of seat time once check-in, ID verification and the instruction screens are done.
No. Registration is gated. Candidates generally need to work for an organisation in the Claude Partner Network, have access to the Anthropic Partner Academy, use a company-domain email address and be at least 18. Personal email addresses generally will not work, and Anthropic makes the final decision.
12 months. Anthropic currently offers a renewal path before expiry that may include a free non-proctored renewal assessment. Miss that window and you generally re-sit the full proctored exam and pay again, so put the expiry date in a calendar the day you pass.
Four attempts per exam in any rolling 12 month period. The waits are 14 days after a first failure, 30 days after a second and 90 days after a third, which adds up to 134 days, so a candidate who has failed three times is more than four months away from a fourth attempt. Every attempt is charged at the full fee as well, so using all four on CCAO-F costs $396. Prepare properly for the first sitting.
Through Pearson VUE, either at a test centre or online with a proctor. Once you pass, the digital credential is issued through Credly.
No. CCAO-F does not currently count toward partner tier eligibility. The Developer and Architect credentials are the ones that contribute, so if partner tier is the goal, start there instead.
Pick by role rather than by level, because the programme is not a ladder. CCAO-F suits people who use Claude without writing code, CCDV-F suits developers building on the API, and the two Architect exams suit people designing systems. Architect Foundations is not a prerequisite for Architect Professional.
These exams launched in 2026. There is no back catalogue of study guides, no decade of forum threads, and a good deal of what circulates online is guesswork. Anthropic publishes its own preparation curriculum through the Partner Academy, and that should be your first stop.
Training Camp runs independent instructor-led preparation built against the published domain weightings above. We are not an Anthropic authorised training partner and we do not sell the exam — you book that directly with Anthropic. What we add is a live instructor, a compressed schedule, and 25 years of working out how people pass certification exams.