in reply to "Tired of FUD" Followup: Where the Jobs Are
Only in the computer-programming industry would you find job listings that emphasize tools rather than skills... including “soft skills.”
You don't see listings for: “experienced mechanic wanted ... must have 3 years' recent experience with wrenches.”
To a programmer, a language is a tool about as basic and generally-uninteresting (in and of itself) as a wrench. New tools come on the scene, go in-vogue and then out again, all the time. (I don't know what language will be invented later this year, that will be the “you gotta have this or you are 0xDEAD.0xBEEF” trend-setter of the year following, but I assure you that there will be one.) The reality is that you are always going to find yourself adapting to “a new tool,” just as you at one time or another “adapted to” Perl.
Today, there are literally billions of lines of COBOL out there doing heavy-lifting in all kinds of industries. Twenty years hence, there might be a commensurate number of lines of Perl out there, along with COBOL, similarly doing the heavy-lifting. What kind of languages and methods we'll be using at that time (hah! to pay for my retirement! code harder, yew dawgs!) is anybody's guess.
Programming-language names are actually a lousy keyword to use in an online job-search, for just that reason. Skip the headhunters ... whom you know will be filtering keywords without having any idea what those keywords mean ... go straight to the hiring principals and sell your ability to solve problems. If someone who actually has the authority to hire you asks, “do you have X-years experience in blah?” look him or her straight in the eye and say, “no, but if you hire me, I'll be an expert by my first day on the job.” (And if you're good, it won't be a lie: you will be.)