Additionally, what can we do to increase the number of developers becoming skilled in Perl.

Grow them from the grass roots! When I arrived at both of my last two companies, there were zero Perl programmers. At the first one, I grew that from zero to three. I must be getting better at this evangelism thing, because there are now about 20 at my current company (admittedly, most of them use Perl as a second language).

In both cases, management never approved (or even knew) about Perl. I just started writing some tools in Perl to help me do my job, showed them to others, gave the odd lunchtime talk about it, and others followed. If you can get around five following you, the momentum seems to pick up because the others then also spread the word (which gives Perl more credibility).

Historically, Perl seems to have had more success growing from the grass roots than from trying to sell to pointy haired management. In that domain, the high powered marketing machines behind "Java Enterprise" and .Net seem to be much more successful than Perl. :-(

BTW, I am currently trying to hire a QA engineer. So, if any monks living in Sydney enjoy QA and testing, feel free to /msg me and I can let you know more details about the position. (Disclaimer: it is not a terribly exciting role, requiring both general QA/Testing skills in addition to Perl/C++ ones).