While most monks rightly criticize the "certification industry", where "simple" people are learning stupid multiple choice tests by heart to impress "simple" HR folks, the learning effect is ignored.

I applied recently for some Perl projects and was horrified to see at what standards those projects where run. I mean those people didn't really know what strict means or how moduls are used. (I ran into a situation where the boss got afraid about my "qualification" endangering his authority. =)

I think having something like the Euler project with a extendable online collection of Perl exercises, maybe cross-linked to online tutorials or chapters in O'Reilly Books (some of Merlyn's book have a training part at the end of the chapters) would be a good thing.

But this side of the coin wouldn't need to include a reliable "measuring" the knowledge in a linear way, to produce a rank for HR-folks.

This measuring could - if ever - only be done for very canonical things which include basic techniques and terminology everyone agrees that should be understand.

(scopes of variables, strict, package, use, type inference (== vs eq),...)

BUT like Monk's XP system is not a reliable measurement of knowledge it works as good motivation.