having a job is not unimportant, but if knowing perl is a requirement for a particular job, consider another one before taking that one. this is true even if you know perl very well. life is too long to be an expert at harmful things, including such evilness as C++ and perl.
can lisp do what perl does easily? [1]
Okay, I admit, I hate perl. Take the worst of /bin/sh, sed, awk and C, throw in some nonsense theories about computer languages should be like ambiguous human languages and give it to people who don't know the first thing about decent design nor maintainable code, and you get perl.
Am I biased? Perhaps a bit. But like Forth, perl has a reputation of being a write-only language. Only Forth has a consitent syntax. Perl doesn't.
And I'm a sucker for perl and C++ bashing.