Prompt Engineering for Everyone
- Free
- Certificate included
- Beginner
- 5 hours
Prompt Engineering for Everyone, course code AI0117EN, teaches non-specialists how to write prompts that get useful answers from large language model chat tools. The Cognitive Class page states an estimated effort of five hours at beginner level, in English, with no technical requirements. Five modules run in order and are built around nine short labs with quizzes: an introduction to prompt engineering, asking what it is and why English can be treated as a programming language; getting started, with a first look at a GPT-based tool, the naive prompting approach, the persona pattern and the interview pattern; the chain-of-thought approach; advanced techniques including tree-of-thought prompting, controlling verbosity, a method the course calls the Nova system, and a tour of IBM's watsonx Prompt Lab; and a course summary with an optional final project.
The page says the course suits both technical and business readers, and that you can work in English or your own language. The course is free of charge and the page says a certificate is offered on completion at no cost.
What you’ll learn
- Explain what prompt engineering is and why plain English works as an instruction language
- Apply the persona pattern and the interview pattern to get better answers
- Use chain-of-thought prompting to work through multi-step problems
- Try tree-of-thought prompting and control the verbosity of responses
- Get to know IBM's watsonx Prompt Lab tool
Who it’s for
Office workers, students and managers who use chat-based AI tools and want repeatable techniques; developers looking to build with LLM APIs should look elsewhere.
Syllabus
5 sections as listed on cognitiveclass.ai.
- Introduction to Prompt Engineering 3 lessons
- Getting Started with Prompt Engineering 4 lessons
- The Chain-of-Thought Approach 2 lessons
- Advanced Techniques 4 lessons
- Final Project 3 lessons
Course details
- Skills covered
- Artificial Intelligence
- Generative AI
- LLM
- Prompt Engineering
- Includes
- 5 modules
On cognitiveclass.ai
Rated 4.8 out of 5 by 33,400 learners; 149,000 enrolled, as shown on the course page on 20 Oct 2026. These are cognitiveclass.ai’s own figures, not ours.
Source: IBM Cognitive Class (opens in a new tab) · Verified · Report a change
More free IBM courses
Every IBM course we have verified, with cost and certificate terms compared.
Computer ScienceAll free Computer Science courses
Free and free-to-audit Computer Science courses from every provider, ranked.