Perl may have gained ground initially in System Administration, and since the Web came along, Perl now is though of more as the language of CGIs.

My previous employer also had a subsidiary in India, and my distributed project included a team there, working on a large (80K line) web application in Perl. Folks coming out of University in India are more likely to have been trained in C++ or Java, but Perl isn't unknown.

On Certification: Be very careful with this. HR departments might like to see certifications on resumes, but in the development teams I've worked in, a Very Big Flag is raised by someone claiming to have a certification. The implication, fair or not, is "this person is a Bozo."