Overview
Most people have tried Claude for a quick question and moved on, without noticing the things it does better than most: careful, natural writing, honest signaling of what it is unsure about, and the ability to hold an entire long document in view at once. The distance between a one-off answer and hours saved every week is skill: knowing what Claude is good at, briefing it well, checking its work, and using the features that turn a chat into finished output.
This is a hands-on, foundation course. It assumes no technical background and deliberately teaches a small set of skills that compound rather than touring every feature. The gradient starts with an accurate mental model of what Claude is, moves to the core skill of asking well, then applies that skill to writing, to analyzing documents that are too long to read in full, and to organizing ongoing work in Projects, and finishes with the habits that keep your use safe and consistent. Every module includes a hands-on lab and builds on the one before, and you will work on tasks from your own job throughout.
Who Should Attend
- Knowledge workers in any role who want real productivity gains from Claude
- Managers and individual contributors whose work is heavy on writing, long documents, and analysis
- Teams standardizing on Claude and wanting a shared baseline of skill
Attendees whose organization runs on Microsoft 365 Copilot may prefer Getting Value from Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Prerequisites
- None. No technical background is assumed
- Access to Claude (a free account works, though some features shown require a paid plan) and a few real work tasks to practice on
What You'll Be Able to Do
- Brief Claude well and compare a short prompt with a fully briefed one on a real task
- Rewrite weak prompts into clear briefs that get genuinely useful answers
- Take a document from rough notes to a polished draft and capture the style for reuse
- Analyze long documents with Claude's large context, and verify what it tells you before relying on it
- Set up a Project and produce a reusable, editable Artifact for recurring work
- Judge what is safe to share with Claude and set your own usage habits
Course Outline
Day one: the fundamentals of working with Claude
- Meet Claude
- What Claude is, in plain language, and what its large context window means for your work
- Strengths, limits, and hallucination: why confident answers can still be wrong, and how Claude signals uncertainty
- Lab: run a real work task through Claude and compare a short prompt with a fully briefed one
- Asking Well: The Core Skill
- The briefing mindset: goal, context, and the format you want back
- Treating the chat as a working conversation, not a search box
- Lab: take three weak prompts from real tasks and rewrite them until the answers are genuinely useful
- Writing and Editing
- Drafting emails and documents from rough notes
- Rewriting for tone, audience, and length, then setting and reusing a writing style
- Lab: take a real document from rough notes to a polished draft, then capture the style for reuse
Day two: long documents, Projects, and working safely
- Working with Long Documents
- Summarizing and comparing documents that are too long to read in full
- First-pass analysis: finding themes, gaps, and the parts that still need a human
- The verification habit: checking claims before you rely on them
- Lab: load a long document, or several, into Claude, analyze them, then verify the key claims
- Projects and Artifacts
- Projects: giving Claude the background knowledge for recurring work
- Artifacts: drafting documents and other outputs you can edit and export
- Lab: set up a Project for a recurring task and produce a reusable Artifact
- Working Safely and Well
- What you should and should not share with Claude
- Company policy, confidentiality, and common-sense guardrails
- Lab: judge a set of realistic scenarios as safe or unsafe, then finalize your personal usage habits
Extended Version
The three-day version keeps the same gradient and adds depth and practice:
- Connecting Claude to your everyday tools and files, and where that helps
- A role-based workshop day applying the skills to each attendee's specific job
- Writing prompts and styles that hold up over time, connecting to Prompt Writing for Business Users
- A capstone in which each attendee builds, documents, and demonstrates a complete personal Claude workflow