Choosing Domains: How Many and Which Ones

Two domains earn the credential. How many you actually take is a judgment about your role, not a target the program sets.

There are six, and they are peers. Research & Knowledge · Analytics · Problem Solving & Decision Making · Influence & High-Stakes Communication · Workflow & Productivity Systems · Business Applications. No core, no electives, no prerequisites, no fixed order. Take any two, in either order, or two in parallel.

Your free nine-question diagnostic recommends where to start. It asks about your work — not about AI — and your personal AI Direction Report identifies the two or three domains where directed AI is most likely to give you leverage first, explained in your own words and drawn from your own answers. Each recommendation is tiered: Best fit now, Best fit soon, or Possible fit. It is developmental guidance, not a competence measure, and the choice stays yours.

Why two, and not one. The eight Direction Abilities are the same in every domain. What differs is how the work goes wrong. Research fails as a plausible synthesis nobody traced. Analytics fails as a method that cannot support the claim made of it. Communication fails as fluency mistaken for argument. Workflow fails as waste automated rather than removed. Learning to validate a research brief does not teach you to notice when your own decision criteria were written after the choice. The ability is the same; the way of being wrong is not — which is why one domain demonstrates a competence and two demonstrate a discipline.

Why more than two, for some people. A consultant researches, analyses, and then has to persuade someone. An operations lead whose recurring work also needs a small shared tool spans two domains before starting. Each further domain is added to the same credential, under the same permanent ID, with earlier achievements intact. Some take two and add more as their role evolves; others commit to all six at enrolment as CAIDA Complete. Both are ordinary routes — more domains means wider, not higher.

They are not all the same length. Four run four weeks. Analytics runs five, opening with a primer week. Business Applications runs six, with two build labs. All six share the same four-week arc.