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Applying to the Claude Partner Network

•3 min read
Claude CodeBuildingAI Development

why

There are three reasons I wanted to do this.

The first is trust. Anyone and everyone is building shit with AI right now (or it seems that way from where I'm standing), and I think it's going to become increasingly important to differentiate. It's noisy out there right now, and that's because there's novelty in AI. Everyone wants to make a product. While I do think it's possible for anyone to learn product management and development, it requires a lot of knowledge and commitment to do it successfully. I think this partnership will be one of the many steps in differentiation, and getting a credential from the company building the models backs that up and builds trust within my own brand.

The second is visibility. When teams are looking for someone to help them put Claude into production, they search for Claude partners. I want to show up when that happens.

Lastly is because it opens the door to the Claude Architect certification. This is something I'm interested in and another expression of my passion and investment. The CCA-F is the deepest Claude certification available so far, and I want to earn it.

where I am

Per Anthropic's guidance, I'll hold off on my personal status until the process is finished. I've submitted the application, I'm almost done with the Anthropic Academy learning path, and the CCA-F technical certification is the next step.

the material feels familiar

I've been building with Claude every day for about a year, so most of the concepts in the material aren't new. It's mostly things I'm already doing or have already done in practice, like context architecture, evaluation design, and specification precision. Reading the Academy material feels like reading the manual for a tool I've already been using. It's actually refreshing because this is how I learn best, by doing, and it just happened to be something I've been doing for a long time now.

how I study

I've created skills to run through practice quizzes once a day to ensure I don't encounter any concepts I'm unfamiliar with and to improve weak areas. The questions I miss are gaps where I'd been solving things intuitively without understanding the terminology behind it. I also used the Anki MCP to create study cards that I can review from on my phone. There are some great repos on GitHub that people have already put together, and I'll link those below.

skills as study aids

I've been using two custom Claude Code skills to prep.

/learn runs a 20 to 30 minute programming lesson built from my own repos. It picks from language fundamentals, architecture patterns, or code reading, and the material connects to code I've already shipped.

/quiz runs 25 scenario-based CCA-F questions and logs the results, so I can see which areas are weak.

If you're preparing for CCA-F and want to build your own skills, I wrote about how I set them up in the-skill-layer.

resources

  • Anthropic Academy: Anthropic's learning platform; the CPN path is accessible through the partner enrollment flow
  • CCA-F: Claude Certified Architect Foundations, the first technical certification on the partner path
  • claude-certified-architect: community-maintained study repo
  • CCA-F Anki deck: shared flashcard deck for CCA-F prep
  • the-skill-layer: how I build and use custom Claude Code skills

There are other community repos and decks out there, these are the ones I've been using.

That's what the process looks like so far. I'll write more once I complete the entire process.