Once upon a time I uncovered a bug that recovered $4MM/year in revenue. It was swept under the rug to protect the team and executives that let the blunder continue for as long as it did. I didn't get a raise, but I made some allies and got to coast for a while.
I really don't think so! If you have experience with any scripting, you can fully grok the fundamentals of awk in 1 hour. You might not memorize all the nuances, but you can establish the fundamentals to a degree that most things you would try to achieve would take just a few minutes of brushing up.
For those that haven't taken the time yet, I think this is a good place to start:
Of course, some people do very advanced things in awk and I absolutely agree that 1 hour of study isn't going to make you a ninja, but it's absolutely enough to learn the awk programming paradigm so that when the need arises you can quickly mobilize the solution you need.
For example: If you're quick to the draw, it can take less time to write an awk one liner to calculate the average of a column in a csv than it does to copy the csv into excel and highlight the column. It's a massive productivity booster.