Nice suggestion. He did do some QA work about 18 months ago at my place of work, and he quite enjoyed it. He has enough brainpower to do programming, with some training, so, for now, I've set him up with some PHP training materials. It's not my first choice for languages, but if he can get experience with that, he'll have a running start at work in a few months time. Many of the jobs that he looked at wanted PHP. Sigh.

I wish it were Perl, but he'll have time to learn Perl later. In any case, I think he needs more exposure to the Linux shell before he's ready for Perl.