What were you doing exactly with Perl? What do you want to do in the future? Are you looking for a specific type of job?

Programming skills are mostly independent of a programming language. Of course it takes some time to get into the details of a new language but in general if you can program in one language you can do so in any.

I would advice to work on more general skills, e.g. Specification/Modeling of SW, Testing of SW, Software Development Lifecycles, Project Methodologies, etc. etc. Stuff that can be reused across many programming languages.

If you ask specifically what program language to go for I would say one that gets you a job! If I could choose I would probably be programming in Ada, a language I admire. But chances of finding an Ada job over here are close to zero. So I focus on stuff that is more marketable. I’m not religious when it comes to programming languages, hardware, OS’es etc. I’ll basically work with anything they throw at me (*). I never specialized and sometimes that works against me. Most of times it works for me.

We also recently got bought by another company:-) Suddenly I have tens of thousands of colleagues. It happened to me 8 years ago too. I learned a lot from it. There is always some pain involved, people leaving, different cultures colliding, "management games", etc. but it also opens up opportunities like new/better/more jobs. It's important to keep a positive attitude.

Cheers
dHarry

(*) Well I refused a few;-)