Claude Code for Operations and Data Teams
Using an AI coding agent to build and maintain business automations, without a software engineering background.
- Instructional hours
- 10
- Schedule
- 4 sessions of 2.5 hours, one per week
- Price
- $3,000 per trainee
- Cohort size
- Up to 6
- Format
- Live over video; hybrid on request
- Delivery
- 100% live and instructor-led, during paid work hours
What
Learning objectives
- 01Set up Claude Code on a company machine with credentials stored securely and a backup routine.
- 02Turn a business process into a written specification an agent can implement and a test can verify.
- 03Connect two practice business systems through their APIs or file exports and move data between them.
- 04Build a scheduled automation and a recurring report with logging and a failure alert.
- 05Review, test and version the resulting code.
- 06Document the automation so a colleague can run and change it.
Who
Who it is for
Operations managers, controllers and senior bookkeepers, business analysts, IT generalists and technically inclined department leads at Massachusetts companies with 5–100 employees.
Comfort with spreadsheets and willingness to work in a terminal. Programming experience is not required.
For Express-funded seats, all participants must be W-2 employees of the company receiving grant funds, including owner-operators.
Why
Why it matters
Most small and mid-sized businesses rely on manual data hand-offs between systems — order to invoice, timesheet to payroll, lead to CRM — that consume staff hours and cause errors. AI coding agents let the people who understand those processes automate them, provided they know how to specify, test and secure the work.
How
How it is taught
4 sessions of 2.5 hours, one per week, live with an instructor: interactive lecture, guided demonstration and hands-on practice. All practice uses the course's standardized practice material: Two simulated business systems (a sample order system and a sample accounting ledger) with matching sample data, identical for every participant.
Capstone
In session 4 each participant builds one scheduled automation that reconciles the two practice systems and produces a weekly exception report.
The instructor reviews each capstone live against a written rubric:
- The specification matches the build.
- The automated tests pass.
- A planted data error is caught and alerted.
- Credentials are not stored in code.
- The run instructions let another participant operate it.
Each participant receives written feedback against the rubric.
Session by session
Hour-by-hour outline
10 instructional hours. Every hour is live with the instructor, and every exercise uses the course's standardized practice material.
| Session | Time | Content | Method |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hour 1 | Environment setup, credential storage, backups and version control. | Lecture and demonstration |
| 1 | Final 1.5 hours | First agent tasks against the practice dataset; committing work to version control. | Paired lab |
| 2 | Hour 1 | Writing a specification and tests; letting the agent implement; proving it works. | Lecture and demonstration |
| 2 | Final 1.5 hours | Specification and tests for a reconciliation between the two practice systems. | Paired lab |
| 3 | Hour 1 | APIs, file exports, scheduled jobs, logging and failure alerts. | Lecture and demonstration |
| 3 | Final 1.5 hours | Capstone build: scheduled reconciliation between the practice systems with logging and an alert. | Hands-on, instructor circulating |
| 4 | Hour 1 | Recurring reports, hardening, documentation and hand-off to a colleague. | Lecture and demonstration |
| 4 | Final 1.5 hours | Capstone review: tests run, planted error caught and alerted, credential check, peer runs the automation from the instructions; written feedback. | Instructor review against the rubric |
Paying for it
Express reimbursement, once approved.
This course is not yet approved, so employers cannot apply for it yet. Once it is, an employer with 100 or fewer Massachusetts employees can apply to the Express program for 100% of the course cost, up to $3,000 per employee. The employer applies at least 21 days before the first session, with a Department of Revenue Certificate of Good Standing, a Department of Unemployment Assistance Certificate of Compliance and a W-9. Program questions go to express@commcorp.org. Our help with the application is free.
Support Forge LLC is a registered training provider with the Massachusetts Workforce Training Fund Express program. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Commonwealth Corporation or the Workforce Training Fund. Program terms are set by Commonwealth Corporation (commcorp.org/express) and govern over anything on this page.