We've been expanding our development team lately, and that means lots of developers who are suddenly tasked with becoming VoiceXML certified. Having gone through this myself (I'm certified, now if only the VoiceXML Forum would update their Certified Developer's list), I am often asked "how much do I need to study?".

There is a lot of content to cover for this exam, I spent about a month studying before my exam and I feel comfortable recommending the same to others. As VoiceXML developers, we're lucky to have a user-friendly specification to study from, unlike some other languages. It's actually quite remarkable that both platform developers and application developers study and work from the same source (the spec). How many people do you know that learned Java from the Java spec?

Spend at least half of your time reading and working with the spec, and the other half of your time studying from a good VoiceXML book or two, and give yourself at least a month to absorb the material.