? I thought Perl was an acronym ... or at least it once was (Practical Extraction and Report Language).

But to the more important point. It does not matter whether or not certification is:

a. worthless
b. not indicative of useful skills
c. for newbies only
d. bound to be out of date in a fast-moving area
e. benefits (makes money) for the certifying organisation

etc.

The point is that it is a GAME Played by employers and HR departments. Having a certificate from a respected body would make it eaasier for me to gain employment as a Perl programmer within large organizations. It is too much effort to try to change the way they work. Heck these people are so thick that they think I can't work on Oracle 11, despite the fact that I have been using Oracle since it used to come on a set of 5.25 inch floppies, and have used every earlier version.

They even think that I can't use AIX because my last Unix work was on Solaris. You can't reason with people that have no actual knowledge of IT beyond a set of buzz words.

In another area of IT I think you can get CISSP accreditation with minimal knowledge of IT security. It seems to me to have been designed only to make money for the certifying body. But many employers ask for it, and having it earned mne a couple of well paid contracts that I would never have had without this (intrinsically not very useful) accreditation.

So I am all for Perl accreditation, even though we all know that it says NOTHING about whether you can actually do the job or not.