Table of Contents
Background
Anthropic launched its own certification program, with Claude Certified Architect - Foundations (CCA-F) being the first certification they offer. It is currently exclusive for Anthropic partners and costs $99 per exam.
Directly quoting from their website:
Prove your expertise in building production-grade applications with Claude.
A ~301 level exam for practitioners at partner companies with foundational knowledge who are ready to demonstrate deeper, applied expertise.
As my employer became an Anthropic Partner, I took a shot at completing this certification.
The Exam
Their exam guide provides more detail into what is to be expected.
At a glance
- Format: Multiple Choice with one correct answer and three distractors
- Questions: 60
- Scoring: Scaled score of 100-1,000
- Passing Score: 720
- Time: 120 minutes
- Attempts: One attempt with six month delay between retries
Content
The content is spread across five domains with different weightings:
- Agentic Architecture & Orchestration (27% of scored content)
- Tool Design & MCP Integration (18% of scored content)
- Claude Code Configuration & Workflows (20% of scored content)
- Prompt Engineering & Structured Output (20% of scored content)
- Context Management & Reliability (15% of scored content)
Scenarios
The exam uses scenario-based questions. During the exam, four random scenarios will be selected form the following list:
- Customer Support Resolution Agent
- Code Generation with Claude Code
- Multi-Agent Research System
- Developer Productivity with Claude
- Claude Code for Continuous Integration
- Structured Data Extraction
My preparation
Learning Resources
To prepare for the exam, I first took a look at the exam guide. This gave me a feeling for all the topics I would have to learn.
I also went through the curriculum of this website: claudecertificationguide.com
While helpful, the website is clearly vibe-coded and I feel like it misses some topics and also includes some mistakes.
I finally went through the official Claude Code documentation to fill the remaining gaps.
I tried to aggregate the most important information of all these resources into my own cheat sheet.
Mock Exams
To assess my readiness, I took the mock exam provided at claudecertificationguide.com.
I personally found the questions to be quite easy to answer.
CertSafari also offers 614 exam-style practice questions.
For me, these questions were harder to answer and closer to the difficulty of the actual exam.
As a final test, Anthropic also offers a practice exam that contains the same domains and scenarios that will also appear on the actual exam. Their recommendation is to aim for a score of 900/1000.
As the questions are always the same, this exam should only be used as the final exercise before taking the actual one.
Outcome
The preperation did pay off and I passed the CCA-F exam 🥳