Attention: unverified and onesided statements about certifications lurking ahead...

I agree with theorbtwo: certifications aren't really useful. The main thing that bothers me is that to me it mostly seems learning by heart to me. That is, a certificate will certify that at one point in time, you knew what is in the manual. Obviously, with perl it's the things that are not in the manual that are even more interesting.

Of course, certificates are not entirely useless -- they prove you did spend some time on the stuff. However, does being a Red Hat certified engineer prove that you are an experienced sysadmin?

I dislike this tendency in our industry to take shortcuts -- looking at certificates instead of spending time to examine what a person really can do (not only what he/she knows). Or looking at buzzwords instead of facts, for that matter.

I know this does not solve your problem of industry acceptance. However, there's a few people that already do excellent perl training. If I had the money, I'd always prefer a course with merlyn to a Perl certificate. Maybe you can hire him to train some of your programmers, I'm sure he'd enjoy a vacation in Brazil :). Or maybe you can use his book, "Learning Perl", to formulate for yourself what Perl programmers need to know -- and to have some kind of training that goes beyond learning the perl manpages by heart.

For me, a very important part of any training would be real problem solving. This is how I learnt perl, and this is what can make you a good programmer.