Claude AI Essentials: Get Productive with Claude in One Day Training

You cannot use a tool well if you do not know what it is or where it breaks. This module builds that baseline.

• How Claude works and what it is designed for
• Strengths, limitations, and choosing the right tasks for AI
• The anatomy of an effective prompt: role, context, task, constraints, format
• Prompting safely with text, images, and documents, plus guardrails and a simple rubric for judging output quality

Lab: Take a messy mix of inputs, including raw research, unstructured data, documents, and handwritten notes, and turn it into a polished deliverable in a single workflow.

A single chat thread forgets everything and mixes everything. Projects fix both problems by giving each workstream its own space with files and instructions that persist between sessions.

• What Projects are and why persistent context matters
• Uploading and managing reference files Claude can draw on every session
• Writing custom instructions so Claude follows your team's standards without being reminded
• Organizing separate workstreams into dedicated project spaces

Labs:

• Build a brand voice Project from a corporate style guide and generate on-brand content
• Set up a contract review workspace with a master agreement, then redline an incoming contract against it
• Create a team onboarding hub from a handbook, org chart, and FAQ, and use it to produce a welcome guide and a 30-60-90 day plan

Chat replies disappear into the scroll. Artifacts live beside the conversation as editable documents you can iterate on without losing earlier versions.

• What Artifacts are and how they work alongside chat
• Generating structured outputs: reports, checklists, tables, dashboards, and templates
• Iterating across multiple prompts while keeping prior versions intact
• Exporting to documents, spreadsheets, or formatted text
• Standardizing repeatable outputs like meeting agendas, status reports, and summaries

Labs:

• Build an interactive KPI dashboard from an uploaded CSV, with charts and filters
• Generate a policy summary and compliance checklist from a policy PDF, then iterate on it live: add columns, reformat, and export
• Create a risk assessment scoring tool with adjustable inputs and automated scoring logic

If you find yourself pasting the same long prompt every week, that prompt should be a Skill. Skills package multi-step instructions into reusable, one-click tools your whole team can share.

• What Skills are and how they turn complex prompts into repeatable tools
• Using ready-made skills from Anthropic's public Skills repository on GitHub
• Converting your own instructions into custom Skills for consistent team output
• Chaining Skills together into multi-step automations

Labs:

• Create a "Session Q&A Document" Skill that reads VTT and chat transcripts and produces a clean, privacy-safe Q&A document
• Build a department-level "Job Description Writer" Skill with required sections and formatting standards, then test it across several roles