That may be a cop-out solution, but it is the one that I suspect is most likely to happen. And the Perl community has a good selection of books for those people to learn from. Getting real-world experience is still problematic, but you've at least made the path to competency more direct.

Another solution is to steal people who have learned in another environment and train them in Perl. And indeed a large fraction of good Perl programmers cut their teeth in languages such as C/C++, Smalltalk or Lisp.

A third solution is to create a company culture of disciplined code reviews. Of whatever level of formality, down to pair programming. I suspect that a company like that could get by with a few smart juniors. Their mistakes would be caught by whoever worked with them, and the environment would ensure that they didn't stay junior for very long.

However I can't actually name any companies off of the top of my head who train new Perl programmers that way. However Geoffrey Young (of mod_perl fame) said that he learned in an environment like that at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) and seemed to have a positive impression of it.

Something that I'm wondering is how good a job various Perl training courses do in jumpstarting the process. We have very good people (eg merlyn, Dominus and TheDamian) teaching these courses, and they put a lot of work into making them good. Does anyone have positive (or negative) testamonials to how well they work?