Claude Certification
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2026-01-29 · claudecert.com

The exam blueprint: what 'foundations' means in practice

Five domains, 27/18/20/20/15 weighting. 'Foundations' doesn't mean trivia — it means production patterns most teams get wrong on day one.

Don't be fooled by the name. Foundations in this context means the patterns Anthropic sees production teams getting wrong week after week — not toy examples.

The weighting

  • Agentic Architecture & Orchestration — 27%. The biggest block. Expect scenario questions where you choose between a workflow, a single agent, and an orchestrator-worker fan-out.
  • Tool Design & MCP — 18%. Schema design, error contracts, resources vs. tools, MCP basics.
  • Claude Code Configuration & Workflows — 20%. settings.json, hooks, slash commands, skills, Agent SDK.
  • Prompt Engineering & Structured Output — 20%. System prompts, caching, JSON mode, few-shot.
  • Context Management & Reliability — 15%. Token budgets, compaction, retries, observability, rollouts.

If you optimize for raw weight, you study agents first. If you optimize for transferable career skill, you study tool design first. We recommend agents first — passing is the immediate goal.