Certifications are very controversial.

In terms of Perl (and other open source projects), there's no "official" certifying organization the way states will certify engineers, or the way companies will certify users of their products (ie, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, etc.).

And assuming a respected third party does certification tests, there are still lots of problems:

• Biggie: tests primarily test for test-taking ability. Often people with little or no experience study and do well on a certifying test. Do you want "Perl certified" people working on your project, or people with years of experience working on your project?
• Certification for different modules? (CGI, DBI, Text::Template, Parse::RecDescent, etc.)? Ok, if you have DBI certs, do you also need Oracle certs to use DBD::Oracle?
• Certification for Perl in different environments? (Win32? Solaris? Linux? mod_perl? fast_cgi?)
• Software evolves. You'll have to keep paying somebody to recertify you for everything every couple of years. A lot of wasted time that could be spent using and learning the actual systems.

So you can tell I'm anti-certification.

What to use in place? Go to training courses and conferences. That's a better way to demonstrate you've been keeping yourself up-to-date on the technology.

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