I'm a systems engineer, and still use perl quite a bit. I have been using it since Perl 4, though, and if I were in a place where picking a "next language" made sense, I probably wouldn't pick it unless I were wanting to get in to bioinformatics or something similar, or were just interested.
It is great for text processing - really, nothing better. I use it a lot for quick and dirty one-offs, because it truly lives up to its name as the Swiss Army Chainsaw of languages and is really expressive, once you're used to it.
That said, for things that other people may end up maintaining, I tend to pick Python, just because that's where the industry is and I think it is kinda rude to leave potential language barriers to others to deal with.
If you're interested, give it a go. Once you get past the nonstandard syntax and some of the more line-noisey stuff (a fair bit of which you can ignore when you're learning), it is pretty easy, syntactically, with some fairly neat tricks. Another under-appreciated aspect of Perl is that, syntactically, it is really a hodgepodge/modernization of unix-heritage languages (C, sed, awk, parts of various shells). So it all tends to kind of make sense together, if you're in a place where you're dealing with the C/C++ part of the unix open source world, doing technical operations, etc.
