Linux administration
In the modern IT enviroment all technicians require a level of Linux administration skills. Even when working in a heavily Microsoft enviroment you will still reguarly find the need to acces some form Linux shells. If even a NAS or the like. My current role is 90% based in Ubuntu. This involves package management, changing apt repositories, moving files around, sorting out ssh keys etc etc.
This need to use linux and Bash then follows on into the need to write bash scripts and automate tasks.
I have basic kernal understanding however cause 70% of the time you are running within virtual machines so your hardware platform is very consistant given it is the abstraction been provided by the Hypervisor you are using there is not often a need to get too involved in recompiling kernals and setting kernal flags or enabling modules. On recent use case for adding a kernal module however was for a loopback alasa sound adapter. This then resolved an audio playback issue when the machine did not have any sound hardware to provide the timing. In the past this had always been acheived by the fact the hypervisor could provide a virutilzed sound device, or in the case of HyperV you could atleast pass though a host USB device and have a USB sound device. We then had a customer using