Every Perl shop I have talked to in the last few years has been on the lookout for good Perl programmers and will hire one when they see him/her, whether or not a job opening formally exists. There is a great shortage of decent Perl programmers. There is a great surplus of script kiddies and University graduates who apply for programming jobs and can't do the simplest of things (the majority of applicants couldn't open a file for reading, according to the last technical manager I spoke to).

On the other hand, I steer clear of job announcements that demand a CS degree, because to me that just indicates that the hiring people don't know what's important and therefore I would probably not want to work there (likewise with ads that begin "Are you passionate about building the next generation of eWidget?" or "Experienced in Agile methodologies including SCRUM, XP, etc."). So my perspective is self-skewed: I don't talk with hiring managers at companies I wouldn't want to work with.

There are plenty of employers who realize that $degree != @skills and (@skills + $degree) > @skills > $degree. Such employers want to know what you can do in Perl, not in college. If you can't prove that through prior work experience, then get busy with a GitHub account and start contributing patches to Perl modules you use (even just docs), upload neat scripts you wrote, or by whatever means get your code out there (again, preferably as contributor to an Open Source project). The type of company you want to work for has technical managers who will judge you by your code more than your education certificates. And conversely, if the company has hiring managers who judge you by your education certificates more than by your work, move on.

I learned Perl at the University of RTFM (there wasn't even PerlMonks!). I am not a Perl expert, much less a guru, but I have enjoyed 25 years of more or less gainful, more or less enjoyable work since I began. The important thing is to write code - and write it well. Look around you: there's sure to be someone in your circle who could benefit from a small Perl script within your capabilities: a non-profit website is usually a good place to start; they don't have any money so they sure aren't going to demand a degree!

The bottom line is: Build your portfolio, with code that is accessible to the public. If you are diligent you can gain marketability an order of magnitude more quickly than by sitting in college classes.

Good luck!