Jquery is a coding language that a lot of employers like to see an applicant possess knowledge of. It is to your advantage to learn Jquery. With Jquery, you can write less and do more. I myself will start learning Jquery so I can code some useful scripts for automating tasks. Here are free sources where you can learn Jquery.
http://learn.jquery.com/about/
This fast-paced tutorial by Louis Lazaris should be able to get beginners up and running with jQuery very quickly
