:m)

I can't speak to the local Perl jobs situation for you, but I would say you should study what you enjoy the most since you have a long career ahead of you and a lot of unhappiness if you commit yourself to the wrong thing.

IT is notoriously fickle; Java has been reasonably steady although in my mind not terribly exciting (just my opinion) but the things that get people jobs tend to revolve more around whatever the new thing of the day is. When I started working the new thing was just to build a website with a bit of database access behind it. Now people are talking a lot about cloud computing and computing devices like iPad, etc.

One thing with regards to how perl jobs are advertised, more than half the companies I worked for had CTOs that would claim Perl is either not used or being phased out, which typically was not true. I find that if you have a take charge attitude you can find spaces for Perl even if you have to spend part time working on other languages. And that's not a bad thing since learning other languages really helps round out your abilities. Although past few years I've worked primarily in Perl before that I probably spent at least 50% of my time doing Javascript, which nearly always can get you some sort of job ;)

Hope it works out for you.

Never bet all your chips on a single programming language, not even if it's Perl. If you really like software engineering, and you are at the beginning of your career where you have more time over to be flexible, you might want to explore a number of different programming languages. That way you'll acquire useful insights into other technologies and exercise your mind at the same time. You might even like to dwell some into the less known more academic languages like Lua. I agree with John that the fun factor is not to be underestimated.