What You Need to Know
In this certification, system-level instructions means the standing rules a person writes in plain English. They live in one of three places: the claude.ai settings, a Project, or, for an administrator, the organisation settings. There is no technical layer underneath.
The office manager at a small locksmith firm uses Claude for customer emails, landlord quotes and home-security guides. Some of her rules are true of her, some of the quotes, some of everyone at the firm, and some only of this week. Two choices decide whether those rules work: where each one goes, and how it is worded.
Three Levels, Three Reaches
Each level has an owner and a reach, and all three are documented.
- Account-wide. The claude.ai settings carry a box labelled Instructions for Claude. Anything written there applies to all of your conversations. The suggested content is personal and cross-cutting, such as preferred approaches, common terms and general communication preferences.
- Project-level. Instructions defined for a Project tailor Claude's responses in that Project's chats only.
- Organisation-level. On Team and Enterprise plans, Owners and Primary Owners can set organisation instructions. Claude follows them in every conversation across the organisation.
Where levels overlap, organisation instructions take precedence. Individual instructions still apply to anything the organisation instructions do not address. An Owner's rule on email sign-offs beats her own. Her spelling rule still applies, because the organisation set nothing on spelling.
The practical point is about role, not mechanics. An ordinary member does not set organisation instructions. So a rule that should bind the whole organisation is a request to whoever administers the workspace. If she wants every colleague's drafts to leave out customers' home addresses, she asks the Owner to add it.
The Placement Question
Place every rule by asking what it is true of. A rule reaches every chat at its level, so the two should match.
- True of you across all your work, such as your language, summary-first, or a lay audience by default: account-wide.
- True of one body of work, its audience, its format conventions, its standing rules: that Project's instructions.
- True of everyone in the organisation: an organisation instruction, requested through the workspace Owner.
- Only true of today's job: not an instruction at any level, but part of today's prompt.
Her British spelling and summary-first are true of all her work, so they go account-wide. "Show the call-out fee as its own line" is true of the landlord quotes: that Project. This week's price rise goes in this week's prompts.
Misplacement costs in both directions. A Project rule promoted to account level reshapes every unrelated conversation. Her call-out-fee rule would turn up in the security guides. An everywhere-rule kept at Project level has to be duplicated and maintained in every Project that needs it. Her spelling rule would need a copy in every Project.
Behaviour, Not Aspiration
A useful instruction is checkable: someone could see whether it was followed. "Keep each item under ninety seconds when read aloud" can be followed and can be failed. "Be engaging" cannot be followed any differently from how the work would have gone anyway. It names no behaviour, so there is nothing to check.
The working test for every line: could a new colleague follow this and produce what you wanted? If not, it is a hope, not an instruction yet. "Sound trustworthy" fails it for her quotes. "Put the price and the call-out fee in the first two lines" passes. Aspirations also crowd the set and lend it a false sense of coverage.
Short and Prioritised Beats Long and Exhaustive
Standing instructions apply to every chat in their scope, so they should contain only what is true every time. A rule true of only one job distorts the others. Sets that gather per-task detail stop describing the work and start describing whichever task came last. Put the price-rise note in the quotes Project and every later quote mentions it until someone removes it.
Length works the same way. A short prioritised set is followed more reliably than a long exhaustive one. When everything is a rule, the rules compete, and the losers are not the ones you would have chosen. When a set has outgrown what a colleague could hold in their head, group it and prioritise it. Appending another rule does not fix it. Her quotes Project might group its rules under price, wording and layout, price first.
Styles are a separate control, for how a response is formatted and delivered (see the note below). Reading across from that, they are not the place for substance rules.
In the exam
This objective tests those two judgements: the level a rule is true of, and wording that can be checked. The role point mirrors Domain 4, which escalates rather than improvises. The line between a standing instruction and today's prompt is the cleanest boundary with Domain 1. Aspirations are this objective's signature distractor, because "tell it to be clear and professional" always reads as sensible advice.
Key Concept
Two questions settle almost every item in this objective. What is this rule true of? That fixes the level. Could a new colleague follow it and be checked against it? That fixes the wording. The keyed answer passes both; each distractor fails exactly one.
A Note on Styles
The Help Center covered Styles only in one formatting comparison, so the point about substance is our reading, not a documented statement. Current state (checked 30 September 2026): the personalisation article no longer mentions Styles, and its formatting comparison names Skills for customising how Claude formats and delivers responses.
Exam Traps
The aspiration dressed as an instruction: be professional, be thorough, produce high-quality work
Aspirations cannot be followed differently from the default and cannot be failed, so they change nothing while crowding the rules that would. The keyed answer states a checkable behaviour instead, and the aspiration option is this objective's signature wrong answer.
Writing this week's requirement into the standing instructions
A standing instruction applies to every chat in its scope. A rule true of one job distorts every other job until someone remembers to remove it; it belongs in that job's prompt, which is where the Domain 1 boundary sits.
Placing one Project's rules at account level, or setting an organisation-wide rule personally
Account-wide rules reshape every unrelated conversation, and organisation instructions are set by Owners and Primary Owners on Team and Enterprise plans. The Associate's keyed move for an organisation-wide rule is a request to the workspace administrator, not a personal setting.
Practice Scenario
An easy-read editor at a learning-disability self-advocacy charity is writing the Project instructions for the easy-read document summaries the charity produces for its members. Every line must still hold for documents produced years from now. Which instruction set will a volunteer checking the outputs be able to use?
Build Exercise
Pressure-Test and Place a Real Instruction Set
What you'll learn
- How to rewrite aspirations as checkable behaviours
- How to place each rule at the level it is true of
- How to route organisation-wide rules through the workspace administrator
- How to shorten a set until a colleague could hold it in their head
- Take the instructions from a Project you use, or draft the set for the Project built in the 5.1 exercise
Why: The exercise needs a real set with real flaws; invented examples flatter the test.
You should see: The full instruction set in front of you, one rule per line.
- Apply the new-colleague test line by line: could someone follow this and produce what you wanted? Rewrite each aspiration as the behaviour you actually check for, and delete lines that restate defaults
Why: Checkability is what separates an instruction from a hope, and defaults restated add length without changing anything.
You should see: A set where every surviving line names something that could visibly be done or failed.
- Mark each remaining line: true of this work every time, true of you everywhere, or only true of a recent task; move the everywhere-rules to your account-wide Instructions for Claude settings and the per-task lines back into task prompts
Why: Placement is half the objective: each rule belongs at the level it is true of, and misplacement costs in both directions.
You should see: Each line tagged with its level, and at least one line moved out of the Project set.
- If any rule should apply to your whole organisation, write the one-sentence request you would send to whoever administers the workspace rather than trying to place it yourself
Why: Organisation instructions are set by Owners and Primary Owners, so the professional contribution is a well-stated request.
You should see: A single sentence naming the rule and why it should bind every conversation in the organisation.
- If the surviving set is longer than a colleague could hold in their head, group it under three or four headings and put the rules that matter most first
Why: When everything is a rule the rules compete; grouping and prioritising decides which ones win on purpose rather than by accident.
You should see: A short, grouped, ordered set, with the rules you care most about at the top.
Sources
- Understanding Claude's personalization features — Anthropic
- Set organization instructions — Anthropic
- What are projects? — Anthropic
- How can I create and manage projects? — Anthropic
- Claude Certified Associate – Foundations Exam Guide — Anthropic