A four-week CCAO-F study plan

Four weeks at a few hours a week. This is an exam of judgement, so the plan is weighted towards practising judgement rather than memorising features.

Week 1 — Use it properly, and watch yourself do it

Spend the week doing your actual job with Claude, but deliberately. For every task, write down what you asked, what came back, and what you had to fix. By Friday you will have a list of the corrections you keep making — that list is Domain 1 and Domain 7 in concrete form. Set up one Project for a task you do repeatedly, with instructions and two or three reference documents.

Week 2 — Evaluation, the heaviest domain

Take five outputs from week 1 and audit them properly: every figure, every name, every citation. Note how many contained something you would not want to have sent. Then rerun two of the same tasks using the checkable-output techniques — supply the sources, restrict Claude to them, require citations — and compare how much verification work each version cost you.

Week 3 — Governance, selection and workflow

Read your own organisation's AI policy; most people never have, and the exam's governance questions become obvious once you have. Learn the eight high-risk domains cold. Then design one end-to-end workflow on paper for a real task at work — trigger, inputs, Claude step, review, output — and be honest about who does the review and when they would skip it.

Week 4 — Drill and consolidate

Work the practice questions, filtered to your weakest domains. Re-read the anti-pattern list, which is where most marks are lost. Skim the cheat sheet the morning of the exam. In the exam itself, for every question, find the stakes in the stem first — the right level of caution follows from that more reliably than any other single heuristic.

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