Not in your area, sorry
I can think of 2 companies in the LA area that have gone from looking for a senior person to someone with a year of Perl or so. (The ad says a year, the reality...)
I think that they'd accept as experience doing a lot of little tasks in Perl while your official job said something else. Given how many people use Perl in that way, I don't see why anyone would want to hire someone intending to teach them Perl from scratch.
Also I wouldn't expect to find opportunities like this outside of a small number of markets. The market in LA being particularly good - that's why I chose to move here last year.
Cheers,
Ben
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra