There are two basic kinds of experience, what you learn while at a job, and what you learn on your own. We are also hiring here, and frankly we dont care where your experience is from, as long as you can talk the talk. When I got my job I only had about a 3 week perl class from my college, but they looked at my side projects and my little perl programming experiments and that is what got me hired. I had no professional experience.

If you have no side projects that you can show an employeer ... start now. It would be great if you had cgi programs on a website and definately make the code available to the interviewers.

Also I would not pay a huge amount of attention to what they want. Everybody want to hire a god programmer, but the fact is they will just as likely hire anybody with a little bit of programming experience.

We have interviewed tons of people, but we cant get a single one. They all put perl on their resume, but if we ask them a question like "what is the difference between $var, @var, and %var" they cant answer that. totally lame.

So start playing with the camal/lama books and learn as much as you can. Code what ever your heart desires, and soon enough the jobs will come. If you have already done that then you are way more marketable than you think.

Good luck, and happy hunting!