How to Get Anthropic Certification: What You Can Do Solo, and What Only With a Partner Company
What this certification is
CCA-F (Claude Certified Architect, Foundations) is Anthropic's first technical certification. It confirms that a person can build solutions on Claude: agents, integrations, business-process automation.
The exam itself:
- 60 scenario questions, 120 minutes
- score scale 100–1000, passing score — 720
- 5 domains: agentic architecture, Claude Code, tool design and MCP, prompt engineering, context management
The main thing everyone confuses: courses, exam and certificate are different levels
Most of the confusion comes from mixing three different things. Here they are separately:
If a friend says "I already passed and got certificates" — they almost always mean course certificates (the first level). The courses themselves are described by Anthropic as "the first step toward unlocking certification." So the courses are preparation, not the CCA-F certification itself.
What you can do on your own (free, without a partner company)
Anthropic made the learning open. Anyone can study and prepare without us:
- 4 Anthropic Academy courses (learning path): Introduction to agent skills, Building with the Claude API, Introduction to Model Context Protocol, Claude Code in Action. Self-paced, each gives a completion certificate.
- An exam trainer (Ukrainian-language): 60 questions in the real exam format, practice as much as you need.
- A preparation breakdown: an example of how an engineer passed the exam and prepared in three weeks.
The ceiling of this path is knowledge plus course certificates. The CCA-F exam itself won't open this way. All links are gathered below in "Resources".
What's available only with a partner company
And here begins what you can't do alone. Both the CCA-F exam itself and the official practice exam open only under the email of a company that is an Anthropic partner. If you sign in with a personal email, you get "Partner Email Required". This is not a bug, it's intentional: the certificate is a quality mark for clients, and access to it is open only to companies inside the partner network.
Here is how the path to a real certificate looks via a partner company:
- A person gets a corporate email of the partner company.
- Registers with it on academy.anthropic.com (a personal email doesn't count).
- Completes all 4 courses fully.
- The company submits the group of completers to Anthropic for confirmation.
- Anthropic verifies it in about a week and adds the company domain to the exam access list.
- After confirmation the official practice exam opens, then the CCA-F itself.
Important about the order: even with a corporate email the exam doesn't open instantly — first the domain goes through confirmation (about a week). That's why the corporate email is issued at the start, before taking the courses, otherwise you'd have to retake them under the work address.
Cost and speed
- Exam cost: free for the first 5,000 employees of partner companies, then about $99 per attempt.
- Speed: preparation at your own pace. But between "started courses under a corporate email" and "can take the exam" there is a pause for domain confirmation, about a week.
Who owns the certificate and what happens if you leave the company
A common question: is the certificate issued to a person or to the company? And if the person later leaves — do they keep it or lose it? Let's split it into what's clear and what we're still clarifying.
What's clear
The CCA-F certificate is individual — it belongs to the person, not the company. It is an exam-based credential for a specific individual, like AWS or Google certificates. If a person leaves the company, the certificate stays with them — it's a personal achievement.
What it gives the company is different: while the person works and is active, they count toward the company's "certified bench", which affects the partnership level (Select, Preferred). When the person leaves, they stop counting toward the company's bench but take their certificate with them. So the company loses not the certificate, but that person's count.
Sources: Complete Guide to CCA-F, lowcode.agency, Preporato.
What we're still clarifying
Two things Anthropic has not spelled out publicly, and secondary sources contradict each other:
- Validity period. Some write the badge lasts 6 months after passing; other materials say "active" means someone who used Claude in the last 90 days. These are different conditions.
- The leaving scenario. There is no direct text in public docs about what happens to the status after leaving the company.
We are clarifying these directly with Anthropic and will update the article once we have an official answer.
Summary: two paths
Want not just to study, but to get a real certificate and work on AI integrations for businesses? WeLabelData is in the Claude Partner Network and brings people in under the company: the exam opens, a shared group for preparation, and real orders after certification. We don't promise a ready stream of clients or a spot in the Anthropic directory — that's a direction we're building. But if you want to grow in this direction together, write to ivan@welabeldata.com.