Top 12 Network Engineer Skills to Put on Your Resume

In a fast-shifting network world, a strong resume blends gritty technical depth with the human stuff: communication, ownership, triage under pressure. The skills below signal you can design, harden, automate, and troubleshoot real networks without flinching.

Network Engineer Skills

1. Cisco IOS
2. Juniper Junos
3. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
4. OSPF (Open Shortest Path First)
5. MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)
6. IPv6
7. QoS (Quality of Service)
8. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
9. VPN (Virtual Private Network)
10. Wireshark
11. SDN (Software-Defined Networking)
12. AWS Networking

1. Cisco IOS

Cisco IOS runs on most Cisco routers and switches. It delivers the routing, switching, security, and management features network teams depend on day after day.

Why It's Important

It’s the backbone of countless enterprise networks. Mastery means faster deployments, fewer outages, tighter security, and cleaner operations across a wide hardware range.

How to Improve Cisco IOS Skills

1. Streamline configs: Remove legacy lines, standardize templates, and use features like archive, configuration replace, and EEM for safer changes.
2. Stay current: Plan image upgrades and SMUs, lab-test first, and track field notices. Stability first, features second.
3. Harden the box: Enforce AAA with TACACS+/RADIUS, SSHv2 only, disable unused services, apply control-plane policing, use secure boot and signed images where supported.
4. Tune routing: Prune prefixes with prefix-lists and route-maps, adjust protocol timers prudently, deploy BFD for fast detection, and enable route dampening carefully.
5. QoS done right: Classify/mark at the edge, use LLQ/CBWFQ, shaping and policing where needed, and validate under load.
6. See everything: Use NetFlow/IPFIX, syslog with timestamps, SNMPv3 or model-driven telemetry, and baseline performance so anomalies pop.

How to Display Cisco IOS Skills on Your Resume

2. Juniper Junos

Junos OS powers Juniper routers, switches, and security platforms with a consistent, modular architecture and a transactional configuration model that’s friendly to automation.

Why It's Important

Predictable commits and easy rollbacks reduce risk. One syntax across platforms lowers cognitive load. Automation hooks multiply your reach.

How to Improve Juniper Junos Skills

1. Live in the candidate: Use commit confirmed, rollbacks, and change diffs to make safer edits.
2. Structure configs: Leverage groups, apply-groups, and logical systems. Keep policy and firewall terms reusable and tidy.
3. Automate: Use PyEZ, Ansible, JSNAPy tests, and event scripts for drift detection and golden-state enforcement.
4. Telemetry and logs: Enable streaming telemetry or JTI, export structured logs, and track commit history with context.
5. Protocols with intent: Validate OSPF/BGP policies explicitly. Limit imports/exports, tag with communities, and document everything inline.

How to Display Juniper Junos Skills on Your Resume

3. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)

BGP stitches autonomous systems together and steers traffic across the Internet and large private backbones. It’s policy-heavy, not fast by nature, but immensely flexible when tamed.

Why It's Important

It decides where your packets wander. Get BGP wrong and routes leak, paths flap, and outages ripple globally.

How to Improve BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Skills

1. Filter ruthlessly: Inbound and outbound. Use prefix-lists, AS-PATH filters, and max-prefix to prevent accidents. No defaults from the Internet unless explicitly intended.
2. Secure the edge: Enable RPKI origin validation. Use TTL security/GTSM, session authentication (MD5 or TCP-AO where available), and strict neighbor ACLs. BGPsec adoption remains limited; plan accordingly. Track ASPA developments for path validation improvements.
3. Summarize and aggregate: Reduce table churn and memory. Announce only what you own. Aggregate upstream when possible.
4. Scale cleanly: Route reflectors for iBGP, careful cluster design, and communities/large communities for policy signaling.
5. Optimize paths: MED, local preference, AS-PATH prepends, and selective multipath for load sharing. Test changes off-hours and measure impact.
6. Protect stability: Consider route flap dampening with conservative parameters. Monitor session health and convergence times with telemetry and BMP where supported.

How to Display BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Skills on Your Resume

4. OSPF (Open Shortest Path First)

OSPF is a link-state IGP that computes shortest paths using Dijkstra and floods LSAs within areas. Hierarchy is the secret sauce.

Why It's Important

Large networks need fast, deterministic convergence. OSPF provides that—when you design with areas, summaries, and clear boundaries.

How to Improve OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) Skills

1. Design hierarchically: Use Area 0 as the backbone, carve non-backbone areas by function or geography, and minimize adjacencies on low-value links.
2. Summarize at borders: ABRs should reduce LSA noise and keep LSDBs lean. Summaries tighten stability.
3. Accelerate failure detection: Deploy BFD on critical links. Tune SPF and LSA throttle timers with care to avoid churn.
4. Right-size areas: Stub and totally stubby where appropriate. NSSA for controlled external route injection.
5. Harden it: Enable authentication (strong hashes), use passive interfaces on access segments, and constrain neighbor formation with network types and filters.
6. Balance traffic: Enable ECMP where symmetry exists and measure for hot spots.

How to Display OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) Skills on Your Resume

5. MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)

MPLS forwards by labels, not long lookups, and underpins VPNs, TE, and carrier backbones. Modern deployments increasingly pair with segment routing.

Why It's Important

Deterministic paths, traffic engineering, and scalable VPNs. It’s how providers and large enterprises keep predictable latency and isolation.

How to Improve MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) Skills

1. Architect for scale: Choose LDP vs SR-MPLS deliberately. If greenfield, segment routing plus TI-LFA fast reroute can simplify and speed recovery.
2. Engineer traffic: Use SR-TE or RSVP-TE (where still required) for bandwidth guarantees and constraint-based paths. Measure, then steer.
3. Harden the core: Isolate control planes, rate-limit label protocols, and verify penultimate hop popping behavior and QoS PHB mappings end-to-end.
4. VPNs with intent: L3VPN for routed segmentation, EVPN for modern L2/L3 services and multi-homing. Prefer EVPN over legacy VPLS in new designs.
5. QoS continuity: Map DSCP/EXP consistently, avoid re-marking surprises, and validate queue behavior under load.
6. Audit and observe: Regular path checks, label stack verification, and SLA monitoring. Keep software current across P/PE nodes.

How to Display MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) Skills on Your Resume

6. IPv6

IPv6 expands address space dramatically and cleans up some protocol baggage. Dual-stack now, IPv6-only cores and services increasingly common.

Why It's Important

Addresses for everything, simpler aggregation, and better end-to-end reachability. The present, not just the future.

How to Improve IPv6 Skills

1. Plan addressing: Allocate on nibble boundaries (/48, /56, /64), document hierarchies, and keep growth in mind. Avoid NAT66.
2. Provisioning strategy: Choose SLAAC, DHCPv6, or a hybrid based on control needs. Guard RAs and DHCPv6 to prevent rogue injectors.
3. Security parity: Update ACLs, firewalls, IDS/IPS for IPv6. Apply uRPF thoughtfully. Enable MLD snooping. Don’t leave IPv6 open just because IPv4 is locked down.
4. Operate dual-stack cleanly: Ensure QoS, monitoring, and tooling are IPv6 aware. Prefer IPv6-only where viable, with DNS64/NAT64 for transitional edges if needed.
5. Visibility: Log with full IPv6 addresses, export flow data, and test reachability from diverse vantage points.

How to Display IPv6 Skills on Your Resume

7. QoS (Quality of Service)

QoS prioritizes what matters and shapes or polices the rest. It’s about fairness and guarantees when links get tight.

Why It's Important

Real-time voice and video, trading apps, control traffic—they all need predictable latency and loss. QoS is the seatbelt.

How to Improve QoS (Quality of Service) Skills

1. Classify at the edge: Define trust boundaries. Mark DSCP once, early, and consistently.
2. Queue smartly: Use LLQ for strict-priority voice, CBWFQ for business classes, and WRED/AQM to avoid bufferbloat.
3. Shape and police: Shape egress to contracted rates; police bursty non-critical flows. Validate token bucket settings.
4. End-to-end thinking: Align policies across WAN, campus, WLAN, and DC. Beware of re-marking by middleboxes.
5. Test under stress: Traffic generators, synthetic probes, and real-call tests. Measure MOS, jitter, and tail latency—not averages.

How to Display QoS (Quality of Service) Skills on Your Resume

8. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)

SNMP collects counters, raises traps, and lets tools query device state. It’s old but everywhere.

Why It's Important

It provides broad observability across mixed fleets. Even as streaming telemetry grows, SNMP remains the common denominator.

How to Improve SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) Skills

1. SNMPv3 only: Use authentication and privacy. Unique users, roles, and views. Retire v1/v2c.
2. Restrict access: Limit managers by IP, enforce ACLs and control-plane policing, and rate-limit agents.
3. Harden communities: If legacy v2c lingers, rotate non-default strings, least-privilege, and segment paths.
4. Trap strategy: Prefer informs for delivery assurance where supported, de-duplicate at collectors, and throttle noisy events.
5. Shift to telemetry: Where possible, migrate high-frequency polling to model-driven telemetry (gNMI/OpenConfig) and keep SNMP for coarse metrics.
6. Patch cadence: Keep agents and NMS platforms updated and audited.

How to Display SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) Skills on Your Resume

9. VPN (Virtual Private Network)

VPNs carve encrypted tunnels over untrusted networks so private traffic stays private.

Why It's Important

Remote access, site-to-site, cloud paths—confidential data needs strong cryptography and sane policy. VPNs deliver both when configured well.

How to Improve VPN (Virtual Private Network) Skills

1. Choose protocols wisely: IKEv2/IPsec for site-to-site, TLS-based or WireGuard for remote access. Favor modern ciphers (AES-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305) and PFS.
2. Strong identity: Enforce MFA, device posture checks, and short-lived certificates or tokens for access.
3. Split tunneling with intent: Per-app or per-prefix policies to cut latency and cost while keeping sensitive flows in-tunnel. Validate DNS paths and prevent leaks.
4. Resilience: Dual headends, diverse ISPs, DPD/keepalives tuned, and graceful rekey intervals.
5. Scale and observe: Load-balance concentrators, monitor throughput and CPU, and log auth/phase states for fast triage.
6. Zero Trust trajectory: Where possible, transition heavy remote-access use cases toward identity-aware proxies and per-app access.

How to Display VPN (Virtual Private Network) Skills on Your Resume

10. Wireshark

Wireshark captures and dissects packets so you can see truth on the wire. Nothing hides from a clean trace.

Why It's Important

Pinpointing latency, retransmits, odd handshakes, or broken MTU is much faster when packets speak directly.

How to Improve Wireshark Skills

1. Filter fluency: Master capture vs display filters. Capture less, analyze more.
2. Profiles and columns: Custom columns, coloring rules, and per-task profiles speed investigations dramatically.
3. Time matters: Sync clocks, use absolute time for multi-host captures, and rely on delta vs displayed delta wisely.
4. Decrypt when allowed: Use TLS key logs or session secrets (with permission) for HTTPS/QUIC analysis. Know what’s legal and approved.
5. Ring buffers and extcaps: Don’t drop packets—use ring buffers, dumpcap, and remote capture safely.
6. Protocol depth: Read RFCs, understand TCP tuning, QUIC behavior, and common application semantics to interpret traces correctly.

How to Display Wireshark Skills on Your Resume

11. SDN (Software-Defined Networking)

SDN centralizes intent and drives the network via APIs and controllers. Underlay stays simple; overlays carry the nuance.

Why It's Important

Faster change, consistent policy, automation at scale. It turns the network into code you can test and ship.

How to Improve SDN (Software-Defined Networking) Skills

1. API-first mindset: Learn REST/NETCONF/RESTCONF, YANG models, and common SDKs. Treat configurations as declarative intent.
2. CI/CD for networks: Pre-change validation in labs, automated linting and policy checks, staged rollouts, and safe rollback.
3. Telemetry everywhere: Model-driven streaming data with analytics to detect drift, saturation, or policy mismatch.
4. Security baked in: Role-based access, signed intents, microsegmentation, and continuous verification. Assume breach; limit blast radius.
5. Choose the right overlay: VXLAN/EVPN in DC, SD-WAN for edge, and consistent identity tags to bind policy across domains.
6. Test chaos: Fault injection and failure drills in a sandbox before production. Document outcomes and close gaps.

How to Display SDN (Software-Defined Networking) Skills on Your Resume

12. AWS Networking

AWS Networking spans VPCs, routing, DNS, load balancing, hybrid connectivity, and security controls that tie cloud resources together, at scale.

Why It's Important

Applications live across regions and on-premises. Reliable, secure, and cost-aware network design makes them sing instead of sputter.

How to Improve AWS Networking Skills

1. Design the VPC right: Subnet by trust zone, enable IPv6 where possible, and keep route tables and NACLs simple and explicit.
2. Connect with intent: Use Site-to-Site VPN or Direct Connect for hybrid. Transit Gateway simplifies large hub-and-spoke topologies.
3. Control traffic: Security Groups for stateful edge, NACLs for stateless subnet policies, and Network Firewall where deep inspection or egress controls are needed.
4. Observe flows: VPC Flow Logs, Reachability Analyzer, and Traffic Mirroring for surgical debugging. Tag everything, correlate quickly.
5. Balance smartly: Pick ALB for HTTP(S), NLB for TCP/UDP, and GWLB for inline appliances. Tune cross-zone settings for cost vs resilience.
6. DNS that scales: Route 53 with private hosted zones, Resolver endpoints, and DNS Firewall to keep queries clean and contained.
7. Modern service connectivity: Use VPC Lattice for service-to-service access across VPCs with consistent auth and policy.
8. Cost hygiene: NAT Gateways can be pricey; consider IPv6 egress-only gateways, PrivateLink, or NAT instances where appropriate.
9. Global performance: Cloud CDN and acceleration services reduce latency for worldwide users. Place data and endpoints close to consumers.

How to Display AWS Networking Skills on Your Resume