Claude Fundamentals is a single-afternoon live-online course that takes you from a passing familiarity with Claude to confident, day-to-day use. We cover the core building blocks, walk through real working examples, and you leave with hands-on patterns you can apply Monday morning.
Course at a Glance
Includes the full 4.5-hour live-online session with a SoftEd instructor, hands-on exercises throughout, and a working library of prompt patterns and project setups you keep after the course. Open enrollment, no minimum group size required.
Course Overview
Claude Fundamentals is an introductory course for professionals who have heard about Claude, maybe tried it once or twice, and now want a structured introduction to using it well. The course is hands-on. You spend the afternoon working in Claude alongside the instructor, with real exercises drawn from typical professional work, so you leave with skills you can immediately apply rather than concepts to look up later.
Who This Course Is For
Claude Fundamentals is designed for working professionals who want a guided, practical introduction to Claude rather than figuring it out alone. The typical participant profile looks like this:
New to Claude
Knowledge workers who have not yet used Claude, or have used it casually and want to learn how to get more out of it.
Moving past basic chat
Individuals who have an active Claude account but have not moved beyond simple question-and-answer interactions.
Teams introducing Claude
Groups rolling out Claude across their organization who want a consistent, shared starting point for everyone on the team.
Want guided practice
Professionals who learn best by doing alongside an instructor, with real-time feedback and a chance to ask questions out loud.
SoftEd has been training enterprise teams in generative AI since early 2023, runs the semi-annual GenAI Day conference, and has delivered more than 30 AI courses to over 2,000 learners.
What You Will Learn
The course is structured around four working blocks of roughly an hour each, with brief breaks between. Each block alternates between instructor demonstration and hands-on practice in your own Claude account.
How to think about Claude
Start with the right mental model. Understanding what Claude is, and what it is not, makes everything that follows easier.
- What Claude is and how it differs from search and other AI tools you may have tried
- The three core building blocks: conversations, projects, and artifacts
- When to reach for Claude versus other tools you already use
- Live walk-through of a real working example, start to finish
Prompting that works
The fundamentals of asking Claude for what you actually want, and what to do when the first response is not quite right.
- What makes a useful prompt: context, role, task, format
- Prompt patterns that work across most everyday tasks
- How to iterate when the first response misses, without starting over
- Hands-on: each participant works through a real prompt drawn from their own work
Working with your own content
Most of the value in Claude shows up when you bring your own documents, notes, and context into the conversation.
- Uploading documents and files into a conversation
- Using projects to organize ongoing work in one place
- Setting context and custom instructions so Claude knows what you want
- Hands-on: each participant sets up a project for one of their real workstreams
Building confidence and good habits
The difference between a casual user and a confident one is knowing when to trust the output, when to verify, and how to keep getting better on your own.
- Quality control: when to trust Claude, when to verify, what to never accept without review
- Common pitfalls and how to spot them before they cause problems
- How to keep building your skills after the course ends
- Open practice time and Q&A with the instructor
Your Instructor
Zaki Medina
Lead AI Instructor, Generative AI and Enterprise StrategyZaki brings 17+ years of enterprise AI experience to SoftEd training engagements, with AI strategies he has shaped generating over $1 billion in business value across Fortune 100 companies. A former Microsoft AI Business School Instructor, he specializes in generative AI, AI-driven automation, and intelligent systems. Microsoft-certified: Azure AI Engineer, Azure Data Scientist, and Azure Data Engineer Associate.
Prerequisites
This is a hands-on course, so a few things need to be in place before the session starts.
- A paid Claude account. The Claude Pro plan ($20 per month) is the minimum tier required. Higher tiers also work. The free tier does not include the features used during the course. Sign up at claude.ai before the session if you do not already have an account.
- A laptop with a stable internet connection. A second screen is helpful but not required.
- A working video conferencing setup. You will need to hear the instructor clearly and be able to share your screen if you have a question.
- Optional but useful: a sample document, file, or task from your real work that you can use during the hands-on exercises. Bringing real material makes the course significantly more valuable.
About SoftEd
SoftEd is a B2B training company with 36 years of experience serving enterprise teams across financial services, insurance, retail, technology, and other regulated industries. Founded in 1990 and now operating as an independent North American company, SoftEd has trained teams at organizations including DBS Bank, National Australia Bank, Walmart, and BP. We have been delivering AI training since February 2023, with more than 30 active AI courses and over 2,000 learners trained.
Our role-specific programs span learning and development, project management, business analysis, product management, executive teams, agile methodology, and high-end agentic AI work.