Originally Posted by
fjetter
It all has to do with how often you are doing CFI lessons. If that's all you're doing is CFI 5 days a week and studying everyday without working and or other school work, yea it's possible in one month. It took me 6 months at 3-4 times a week while finishing my senior semester in college and that was relatively fast for my flight school.
Retention is a big deal here. If you do a quickie program, be sure you can line up a job post-haste. While the one week-to-one month programs will prepare you for the checkride, a lot of the knowledge is going to fall victim to disuse if you don't start teaching and putting it into practice immediately.
A longer program, with the ability to spread out your study and really think through and meditate on topics is better for longer term retention, not to mention it gives more opportunity to pick up "supporting knowledge"--things not directly in the PTS, but interesting and informative and which will make you a better teacher overall, especially if aren't going to be immediately putting your certificate to use.
Books: Fundamentals of Instruction, CFI PTS (I'd get the ASA PTS guide, as well), Airplane Flying Manual, Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge are mandatory. I'd also recommend Aircraft Systems for Pilots, the new edition of Weather Services and Stick and Rudder. Gleim books and/or software are handy for knowledge test prep. You should be able to pick up all of those at most decent-sized pilot shops, but between Sporty's and ASA's websites, you should be able to pick them all up online.
Stuff to know: Prepare to take your FOI knowledge test as soon as you can. The test is 100 questions with a question bank of less than 200. This is a test you can practically memorize without too much work. You don't need an endorsement to take any of the CFI knowledge tests (yet...), but you will need a sign-off from your CFI saying you went over the FOI together.
Also on knowledge tests, when you take your Flight Instructor Airplane test, schedule your Advanced Ground Instructor test, as well. AGI has the exact same test bank, plus 10 questions. The same goes for Flight Instructor Instrument and Instrument Ground Instructor (IGI adds a couple helicopter questions, but is otherwise identical). There's no practical test for the ground instructor certificates, so once you've completed your FOI, AGI and IGI tests (or your CFI-Initial practical and the ground knowledge tests), you can just schedule an appointment with the FSDO to pick up your AGI and IGI certs.
Last thing: If you can, find a place that teaches CFI in a plane with which you're familiar. The flight portion of CFI training should be simple--you're already a commercial pilot. All you're really doing with the air work is learning to fly from the right seat and teach while so doing. If you already know the airplane and its procedures, you can easily save yourself 5-10 hours of costly flight time.
Good luck!
ps. don't forget to get your spin endorsement. And, if you can, try to go up in an aerobatic plane for it.