Some companies have moved towards Perl-based development, and these companies cannot get enough good Perl programmers. Often I have been asked in a role if I know anyone else that is good - and I have to say no as I know few good Perl programmers personally.

My current employer is having this problem actually. They are looking to hire two perl developers, but the -two- candidates thus far have had minimal perl experience. And my last employer complained that while it is easy to find perl scripters it is difficult to find perl software engineers.

My advice to the OP is to work on placing yourself firmly in the perl software engineer role, which shouldn't be difficult given your background in C++. You may have trouble getting started if you don't have much professional perl experience.. but that could be helped by side projects. Here are a few things you could do to make yourself more attractive:

1. Contribute useful modules to CPAN (but check for existing functionality first)
2. Submit patches to CPAN modules
3. Create test cases for CPAN modules that you frequently use, when you find an edge case that isn't tested
4. Participate on perlmonks. I have learned more from answering questions and being corrected than I have from most books

It would also be helpful to read the following if you are serious about pursuing perl in your career:

• Higher Order Perl
• Perl Best Practices
• Object Oriented Perl
• Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook
• Perl Hacks

But perhaps most importantly you should consider what area of perl you want to work with, and build up the related skill sets. For example if you want to work on web applications you should spend a lot of time learning different databases and templating systems.