Though it sounds good there is a major problem with that form of references.
This might work on the very pinical of the perl world where a few renowned people have over the years proven to anyone and everyone in the perl world tha they are as good as the rest of us hopes to become, but as soon as one names the next tier down most of us will maybe have heard of 50% of them, one more step and chances are you might know only one or two of those people.
I think that a formal certification will do nothing but slow perl down, quickly changing the way somehting works or removing or renaming a function will become near impossible.
If all you want to do is show an employer how good you are at perl then a certificate is absolutely pointless. An example of your work is far better, a test designed to test your skills written by existing developers in a company will be great to proof or disproof your claims of perl mastery at least for that job, it also gives you a posibility to estimate the skill already in the company.
