i think that the most important baseline skill for anyone working with IT should be:

can you search a filesystem for files with a given extension, sort them in descending order and output the parent directory name, and then append a string to each one, and then create an empty file with this name in the current working directory?

this requires grep, sort, cut, sed and xargs, an understanding of pipes, ultra basic regex, and i could have done this for you back in 1995 - stuff i learned by using man on a free dialin shell account