In the recent (and ongoing) discussions about the use and feasibility of some kind of Perl certification, I think most participants either did not feel comfortable with a formal Perl certification or argued that it is impossible to conceive an easy-to-correct, objective, inexpensive, modular, trusted, and fair testing method.
Personally, I can understand the former, but the points that have been made for the latter case really convinced me - eventhough I still think that if we *could* come up with a test that fits the above requirements, that test would be to the benefit of both employers and job seekers.
Accepting that we won't be able to provide such a test, maybe we should try to provide some guidelines on what should be covered in such a test (for a given portion of all Perl know-how), so employers can more easily assemble their own tests or list of questions for interviews. This cannot make up total ignorance in the field, but it might give employers *and* job seekers a general overview of requirements for a given field.
I have spent a couple of minutes brainstorming and writing down a few sections of qualifications that might be relevant to many jobs. The list is everything but complete and should do more bad than good if used as guideline for test construction in its current state (as of 17:22 07.03.2003 GMT+1). You can find it at http://steffen-mueller.net/topics.txt . Perhaps it could be a start? Do you think this is useful? Would you be willing to help? (If not, I won't spend more time on it and remove it from the web.)
Steffen
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