In my 13-year industrial career, I never used Laplace transforms.  However, transfer functions and block diagram notation are efficient methods to describe dynamic behaviors, and are often the representation of the algorithms in filtering and control as presented in vendor bulletins and instruction manuals.  They have become our historical legacy language of representing process dynamics.   Accordingly, a control engineer, should understand what transfer functions mean; especially relating to FOPDT models, filtering, PID controller options, and feedforward methods.  This is about how to translate Laplace notation to an understanding of process or controller actions - not about the mathematical theory.