I passed Anthropic's Claude Architect Foundations CCA-F on the 1st try (no coding background) & helped 20 others too
If you had no idea about the official Anthropic Certifications there are 4 now. The first one is the one I passed in August Claude Architect Foundations CCA-F.
We did this as a small community of women in AI who wanted to validate our knowledge of AI to the source and get best practices on how to work with it, especially for client implementations.
If you are into AI consulting, services, agents and education/strategy, and have no coding background, this is a huge knowledge booster in my opinion. I have been a product and project manager before but this really clarified where AI fits in business implementations.
The pod
I didn't do this alone. I led a study pod of about 20 women, most of them non-technical, through the same prep. Most of those who have taken the exam so far passed on their first try. I passed first to make sure that I can actually help them.
What the exam is
The basics:
- 2 hours, 60 questions, proctored online
- Closed book, and you can't use Claude during it (yes, the irony)
- You get 4 scenarios, picked at random from 6, with 15 questions on each from the exam guide
- 5 technical domains covered with a big emphasis on Agentic AI
The six scenarios are a customer support agent, code generation with Claude Code, a multi-agent research system, structured data extraction, developer productivity, and Claude Code in continuous integration.
What surprised me
"Foundations" is misleading. It doesn't ask for definitions. It drops you into a situation where something is broken or misbehaving and asks how you'd fix it using best practice. The official practice exam is easier than the real thing.
If you don't write code for a living, half of those scenario names sound like they're not for you. That was my first reaction too.
What worked
- Learn the vocabulary first. Most of the difficulty was language, not logic. Once I knew what the terms meant, the questions became judgment calls I could reason through.
- Study by scenario, not by topic. The exam is organized around situations, so I prepared that way.
- Learn the specifics. Which files exist and where they live, what each built-in tool can and can't do, and when to use which pattern. This part is memorization plus practice, and there's no way around it.
- Get hands-on. Non-technical doesn't mean hands-off. You don't need to be an engineer, but you do need to have used the tools. I created a Claude Code project and used it to study.
- Know the Exam Traps They tend to be wrong in the same few ways and be repeated. Learning how to spot those patterns quickly helped me most.
- Flag and move on. I marked the questions I wasn't sure about and came back at the end. but don't go back too much and second guess yourself - difference between passing and failing.
The biggest lesson was that explaining a scenario out loud to someone else showed us quickly what we didn't understand yet.
What I got at the end: a badge by Anthropic and a whole lot of knowledge on where AI actually fits in a business workflow and implementation best practices.
Happy to answer questions about the exam or the prep in the comments.
If you're curious
We're hosting a free one-hour webinar on Tuesday, October 20 at 5 p.m. Eastern. It covers what the certification is, who it's for, and how we prepared as non-technical people.
Comment CCAF for the link