Top 12 Network Consultant Skills to Put on Your Resume

In today's fast-evolving digital landscape, a network consultant’s toolkit has to stretch wide and dig deep. Hard technical chops, yes, but also judgment, clarity, and the instincts to keep traffic humming and threats boxed out. A resume that surfaces the right blend of skills can tilt the table in your favor and get you in the room.

Network Consultant Skills

1. Cisco IOS
2. Juniper Junos
3. BGP
4. MPLS
5. OSPF
6. IPv6
7. Wireshark
8. VMware NSX
9. AWS Networking
10. Azure Networking
11. Python (for automation)
12. SD-WAN

1. Cisco IOS

Cisco IOS (Internetwork Operating System) powers most Cisco routers and many switches. It sits at the heart of routing, switching, policy, and security—your hands on the wheel that steers packets and enforces rules.

Why It's Important

IOS is the control plane you’ll touch every day in Cisco-heavy networks. Configuration, monitoring, hardening, and fast recovery live here, so fluency means smoother operations and fewer surprises.

How to Improve Cisco IOS Skills

Sharpening IOS proficiency blends hygiene, security, and design discipline.

1. Run a recommended release: Track Cisco’s suggested versions for your platform. Plan upgrades, test in a lab, and pin to stable trains.

2. Tighten configuration: Remove unused services, standardize templates, and enforce role-based CLI. Keep configs small, readable, and version-controlled.

3. Harden access: Use SSH, AAA with TACACS+/RADIUS, secure boot, image signing, and Control Plane Policing (CoPP/CPPr). Prefer modern crypto suites.

4. Apply modern security features: Zone-Based Firewall, uRPF where applicable, DHCP snooping, dynamic ARP inspection, and storm control. Log wisely; alert on anomalies.

5. Automate and model: Embrace NETCONF/RESTCONF, model-driven telemetry, and structured templates. Consistency is king.

6. Back up relentlessly: Scheduled, encrypted, off-device backups with golden configs and rapid restore procedures.

7. Prioritize traffic: Build QoS policies for voice, video, and critical apps. Police the noisy stuff. Validate with live measurements.

8. Segment smartly: Use VLANs, VRFs, and ACLs to reduce blast radius and broadcast chatter. Document the boundaries.

Good IOS practice turns complexity into something predictable—and recoverable under pressure.

How to Display Cisco IOS Skills on Your Resume

2. Juniper Junos

Juniper Junos is a consistent, high-performance network OS running across routers, switches, and security platforms. Clean separation of config, commit/rollback, and a predictable CLI make it a favorite for large-scale environments.

Why It's Important

Junos enforces operational discipline. A unified approach to configuration, automation, and troubleshooting translates to reliability and speed when it matters.

How to Improve Juniper Junos Skills

Build muscle memory and automation habits.

1. Learn the commit model: Staging, compare, confirm, rollback. Treat config like code and prevent footguns.

2. Use structured tools: Automate with PyEZ, Ansible, and JSNAPy for validation. Embrace YAML/JSON inputs and idempotent workflows.

3. Practice in labs: Spin up virtual devices, break things, then fix them. Repeat until it’s boring.

4. Dive into policy: Master firewall filters, routing policy, and hierarchies. Small changes, big impact.

5. Embrace telemetry: gNMI/gRPC streaming, event policies, and health baselines turn smoke into signals.

6. Stay current: New features ship often. Track release notes and feature parity across platforms.

Confidence in Junos grows when your changes are deliberate, observable, and reversible.

How to Display Juniper Junos Skills on Your Resume

3. BGP

BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is the internet’s routing handshake between autonomous systems, trading reachability and selecting paths based on policy, not just speed.

Why It's Important

It’s how the world connects. Get BGP wrong, and traffic vanishes down a hole. Get it right, and global routing becomes orderly, resilient, and sane.

How to Improve BGP Skills

Reduce blast radius, increase certainty.

1. Validate routes: Deploy RPKI origin validation. Maintain accurate ROAs. BGPsec remains niche; focus on what’s widely deployed.

2. Filter everything: Prefix-lists, AS-PATH filters, and max-prefix limits on every session. Only accept what you expect.

3. Tune stability: Use graceful restart, route flap dampening (sparingly), and BFD for faster failure detection.

4. Leverage communities: Tag, steer, and simplify with consistent community taxonomies. Document meanings; avoid snowflakes.

5. Scale sanely: Route reflectors in iBGP; avoid needless full mesh. Consider add-path where multipath is needed.

6. Secure sessions: GTSM/TTL security, TCP-AO where supported, and strict MD5 if legacy. Protect control planes.

7. Aggregate wisely: Summarize where possible; keep the table lean and convergence quick.

8. Monitor continuously: Telemetry, BMP feeds, route collectors, and anomaly alerts. See leaks and hijacks before users do.

BGP is policy. Write the policy you can explain at 3 a.m. and audit on Monday.

How to Display BGP Skills on Your Resume

4. MPLS

MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) forwards by labels, not long lookups. It accelerates core networks, isolates tenants, and enables VPNs and engineered paths with predictable performance.

Why It's Important

Enterprises and service providers lean on MPLS for QoS, traffic engineering, and clean separation. It’s the backbone of many critical networks.

How to Improve MPLS Skills

Make the core fast, simple, and observable.

1. Pick the right control plane: LDP for simplicity, RSVP-TE for explicit paths, or move to SR-MPLS with SR-TE for a cleaner control plane.

2. Engineer traffic: Constrain flows to avoid hot spots, balance load, and meet SLAs. Validate with live telemetry.

3. Harden QoS: Map DSCP to EXP (TC) consistently end-to-end. Protect voice/video. Police the rest.

4. Build VPNs cleanly: L3VPN and L2VPN with clear route-targets and import/export policy. Keep route distinguishers consistent.

5. Speed up failure recovery: TI-LFA or FRR for sub-50ms protection. BFD tightens detection loops.

6. Use OAM tools: LSP ping and traceroute, RFC-compliant continuity checks. Visibility matters.

7. Plan migrations: If moving to segment routing, phase-in with interop, test scale, and document label stacks and policies.

Great MPLS designs hide complexity from the edges while keeping the core nimble.

How to Display MPLS Skills on Your Resume

5. OSPF

OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) is a link-state IGP that discovers topology, runs SPF, and converges quickly. OSPFv2 handles IPv4; OSPFv3 covers IPv6.

Why It's Important

Inside the domain, OSPF is the map. Scalable areas, fast detection, and deterministic design keep the core stable.

How to Improve OSPF Skills

Design first, then tune for clarity and speed.

1. Hierarchical areas: Keep Area 0 pristine. Use stubs and NSSA wisely to contain routes and shrink LSDBs.

2. Tune timers: Adjust hello/dead intervals based on media. Add BFD where loss needs instant reaction.

3. Summarize at ABRs: Reduce churn and table size. Summaries calm the storm during failures.

4. Stability levers: SPF throttling and LSA pacing prevent CPU thrash when links flap.

5. Secure adjacencies: Prefer HMAC-SHA where supported. Limit neighbor formation with passive interfaces.

6. Mind the cost: Set interface costs intentionally. Don’t rely on defaults to shape traffic.

7. Monitor health: Track adjacency changes, LSA floods, SPF events, and LSDB size. Baselines reveal drift.

OSPF should feel boring in production. Boring is good.

How to Display OSPF Skills on Your Resume

6. IPv6

IPv6 expands addressing to 128 bits and cleans up many IPv4-era quirks. It’s the path forward for scale, IoT, and modern security postures.

Why It's Important

Address exhaustion is real. Dual-stack today, IPv6-first tomorrow. Better routing, simpler NAT-free designs, and future-proofing baked in.

How to Improve IPv6 Skills

Plan, protect, and measure.

1. Addressing strategy: Design hierarchical, aggregatable prefixes. Document allotments per site and role.

2. Transition plan: Start dual-stack, prefer IPv6 in policies, and use NAT64/DNS64 when IPv4-only apps lurk.

3. Secure the edge: RA-Guard, DHCPv6-Guard, uRPF, and ICMPv6 sanity. Don’t block essential ICMPv6—path MTU needs it.

4. QoS and SLAs: Apply the same QoS care you give IPv4. Verify traffic class handling and ECN behavior.

5. DNS and apps: Ensure AAAA records, test resolver behavior, and watch for Happy Eyeballs timeouts.

6. Visibility: IPv6-capable flow logs, packet captures, and topology views. No blind spots.

IPv6 thrives with intent. Treat it as first-class, not an afterthought.

How to Display IPv6 Skills on Your Resume

7. Wireshark

Wireshark captures packets and exposes the truth. Protocol by protocol. Frame by frame. No guesswork—just evidence.

Why It's Important

When symptoms mislead, captures don’t. Performance issues, handshake failures, odd resets, security incidents—Wireshark turns fog into facts.

How to Improve Wireshark Skills

Focus on speed and signal-to-noise.

1. Filter like a pro: Master capture and display filters. Save macros and reuse them. Less scrolling, more solving.

2. Profiles and coloring: Build per-environment profiles, shortcuts, and color rules that surface patterns fast.

3. Expert Info: Use built-in diagnostics to triage. Warnings and errors point to likely culprits.

4. Automate with TShark: Script recurring analyses. Batch-process pcaps and export structured results.

5. Decrypt where permitted: Set up keys for TLS or 802.11 where you have lawful access. Visibility unlocks root cause.

6. Protocol depth: Learn the quirks of TCP, HTTP/2, QUIC, DNS, and SIP. Context accelerates analysis.

Great analysts capture the right packets, at the right points, for just long enough to prove the point.

How to Display Wireshark Skills on Your Resume

8. VMware NSX

VMware NSX brings network virtualization and security to the data center and cloud. Think micro-segmentation, distributed firewalling, overlay networking, and policy-driven automation.

Why It's Important

Security moves closer to workloads. Segmentation becomes granular. Operations get repeatable and fast, even at messy scale.

How to Improve VMware NSX Skills

Design for clarity, secure by default, and automate.

1. Stay current: Track stable NSX releases and features like distributed IDS/IPS and NSX Intelligence. Plan upgrades deliberately.

2. Solid overlays: Build a clean underlay, then overlay with consistent transport zones, T1/T0 design, and well-documented routing.

3. Micro-segmentation: Start with visibility, group by intent, then enforce least privilege. Iterate. Reduce exceptions over time.

4. Integrate security: Use distributed firewalling, IDS/IPS, and threat intel. Align logs with SIEM for end-to-end traces.

5. Automate policy: Drive changes through the policy API, templates, and pipelines. Treat NSX like code.

6. Federate and scale: Use NSX Federation and consistent naming to manage multi-site and DR cleanly.

The promise of NSX shows up when policy reflects application intent—not just IP addresses.

How to Display VMware NSX Skills on Your Resume

9. AWS Networking

AWS Networking spans VPCs, routing, load balancing, DNS, private connectivity, and security controls—designed to build resilient, global architectures without owning hardware.

Why It's Important

Right-sizing cloud networks saves money, reduces risk, and scales on demand. Missteps show up in latency, outages, or a painful bill.

How to Improve AWS Networking Skills

Architect with simplicity, security, and observability in mind.

1. Use Transit Gateway: Centralize multi-VPC and hybrid connectivity. Fewer peering meshes, more order.

2. Establish private connectivity: Direct Connect for predictable throughput and reduced egress uncertainty. Plan redundancy across locations.

3. Design clean VPCs: CIDR planning, subnet roles, route tables, and NACLs that make sense. Keep it boring and consistent.

4. Optimize egress costs: Prefer PrivateLink and VPC endpoints, leverage CloudFront where it fits, and collapse NAT usage where possible. Savings Plans apply to compute, not bandwidth.

5. Protect the edge: WAF and DDoS protections, sane security groups, least-privilege access, and shield the control plane.

6. Choose the right balancer: ALB for HTTP(S), NLB for TCP/UDP performance, GWLB for service insertion.

7. Observe everything: VPC Flow Logs, CloudWatch metrics, Reachability Analyzer, and Network Access Analyzer. Close the loop with alerts.

8. Mirror traffic when needed: Targeted traffic mirroring for deep dives—short windows, tight scopes.

9. Automate at scale: IaC with CloudFormation/Terraform, consistent tagging, and approved patterns for repeatable builds.

10. Plan for failure: Multi-AZ by default, multi-region where it matters. Test failover paths, not just diagrams.

Great cloud networks don’t sprawl; they’re deliberate, silent, and cheap to run.

How to Display AWS Networking Skills on Your Resume

10. Azure Networking

Azure Networking covers VNets, peering, load balancing, private access, DDoS protection, and hybrid connectivity with policy and monitoring baked in.

Why It's Important

Hybrid is common. Azure’s breadth lets you stitch together secure, scalable topologies that behave well across regions and on-prem.

How to Improve Azure Networking Skills

Lean into governance, visibility, and smart routing.

1. Azure Virtual WAN or VNet Manager: Centralize routing, security, and connectivity patterns. Less drift, more consistency.

2. ExpressRoute where critical: Private, reliable links for sensitive or latency-prone workloads. Add FastPath for performance.

3. Harden with NSGs and Azure Firewall: Layer controls. Use application rules, FQDN tags, and threat intel where appropriate.

4. Front Door and Traffic Manager: Improve global performance and resiliency with smart routing and edge acceleration.

5. Private Link and endpoints: Keep traffic off the public internet. Reduce egress and improve security posture.

6. DDoS Protection: Enable plans for internet-facing endpoints. Validate runbooks for attack scenarios.

7. Observe and validate: Network Watcher, Connection Monitor, packet capture, and topology views. Detect drift early.

8. Policy at scale: Azure Policy and Blueprints to enforce tagging, SKUs, and security baselines. Guardrails beat cleanup.

Azure networks shine when governance and design patterns come first, not last.

How to Display Azure Networking Skills on Your Resume

11. Python (for automation)

Python turns repetitive, error-prone network tasks into scripts and pipelines. Less toil, more reliability. Glue for APIs, devices, and data.

Why It's Important

Automation cuts variance and speeds delivery. Scripts scale better than late nights and manual keystrokes.

How to Improve Python (for automation) Skills

Build fundamentals, then branch into network-native tooling.

1. Core Python: Get comfortable with functions, classes, typing, virtual environments, packaging, and logging.

2. Network libraries: Use Netmiko, NAPALM, Paramiko, Nornir, and pyATS/Genie. Pick tools that fit your platforms.

3. APIs everywhere: Interact with REST and gNMI. Parse JSON/YAML, handle pagination, backoff, and errors gracefully.

4. Templates and data: Jinja2 for configs, structured inventory, and validation with Pydantic where it helps.

5. Test and lint: pytest, black, flake8, mypy. Treat automation as software, not throwaway scripts.

6. CI/CD for networks: Pipelines to test, stage, and deploy. Pre-checks, dry runs, and rollback plans by default.

Automate small tasks first, then string them together. Momentum follows.

How to Display Python (for automation) Skills on Your Resume

12. SD-WAN

SD-WAN abstracts WAN control, steering applications over MPLS, broadband, LTE, and more with centralized policy and constant path checks.

Why It's Important

It slashes circuit costs, boosts app performance, and simplifies operations—especially across many sites with many links.

How to Improve SD-WAN Skills

Design for apps, observe relentlessly, and keep security close.

1. Application-aware policies: Classify apps accurately and route by SLA. Voice gets low jitter; backups take the scenic route.

2. Security in-line: Fold in ZTNA, next-gen firewalls, and threat intel. Encrypt everywhere, inspect where allowed.

3. Visibility and analytics: Real-time health, synthetic probes, and user experience scores. Act on signals, not hunches.

4. Resilience: Diverse transports, brownout detection, dynamic path selection, and FEC where useful.

5. Cloud on-ramps: Direct, optimized paths to major SaaS and IaaS platforms. Fewer hairpins, happier users.

6. Zero-touch deployment: Ship, power, claim. Standardize templates and avoid per-site snowflakes.

7. Automate policy: APIs, templates, and pipelines for consistent, auditable changes at scale.

8. Plan for SASE: Align SD-WAN with SSE services for unified policy and identity-aware access.

Done well, SD-WAN feels invisible. Apps just work, and the WAN stops being the bottleneck.

How to Display SD-WAN Skills on Your Resume