That's what I would prefer, a series of certs that highlight what areas of Perl you have explored. Have one cert for the basics and then additional certs for each 'major' area of expertise. If I'm in charge of a group of programmers maintaining a web site, I don't really care how much knowledge you have about the Win32 modules, it's just not relevant to what we are doing here.

• How do you keep people from learning the test by taking it several times? Have a VERY LARGE pool of questions from which any single test pulls its questions.
• How do you test someone's learning ability? There are other tests for that, but in a purely perl universe, just give extremely difficult questions and measure how long it takes someone to answer them. This gives you a good bead on whether the test taker can find relevent information quickly.
• Psychological tests also exist that can measure your ability to focus on a task, analyze a problem, work in teams/ work unsupervised, etc. (disclaimer, I'm working for a psychological testing firm putting those tests on the internet)

This is absolutely do-able, the question is one of authority and commonality. The company/group handing out certs has to have the reputation to back those certs up and there have to be enough people using the certs to make them a standard.

I think a relatively low fee is a good idea ~10 USD. At that price, the company giving certs isn't going to make very much money (or will just break even), but I think that adds to the 'authority' side of the equation. The testing authority is giving certs because it is fullfilling a function in the community, not because they see it as a huge profit center.

oakbox