Top 12 Network Support Engineer Skills to Put on Your Resume
In today’s fast-paced digital world, a Network Support Engineer keeps the pipes humming and the packets honest. The right skills on your resume punch through the noise—proof you can maintain, troubleshoot, and squeeze more performance from complex networks without flinching.
Network Support Engineer Skills
- Cisco IOS
- Juniper Junos
- BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
- OSPF (Open Shortest Path First)
- MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)
- IPv6
- Wireshark
- SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
- QoS (Quality of Service)
- VPN (Virtual Private Network)
- Firewall Configuration
- Cloud Networking
1. Cisco IOS
Cisco IOS (Internetwork Operating System) and IOS XE power many Cisco routers and switches. They provide the control plane for routing, switching, security, automation, and telemetry that glue enterprise networks together.
Why It's Important
It’s the daily driver for configuring and managing Cisco infrastructure—core to secure operations, stable connectivity, and measurable performance.
How to Improve Cisco IOS Skills
Sharper, safer, faster—aim for all three:
Stay current: Keep images updated and standardize on vetted versions across fleets to reduce drift and patch exposure.
Harden access: Prefer SSH, TACACS+/RADIUS, role-based CLI, and restrictive management ACLs. Disable legacy and unused services.
Model-driven operations: Use YANG, NETCONF/RESTCONF, and model-driven telemetry for consistent configuration and streaming visibility.
Structured logging: Ship logs to centralized collectors. Tag with device/site/role. Alert on auth failures, config changes, and control-plane noise.
Backups and rollback: Automate nightly config backups, versioning, and golden configs. Test rollback plans.
QoS and performance: Mark, queue, and police intentionally. Validate with show commands and telemetry, then iterate.
Config reviews: Periodic audits catch shadow ACLs, unused objects, and risky defaults.
Lab first: Test in emulation or hardware labs before production. Document deltas and caveats.
These habits harden devices, reduce outages, and make change safe instead of scary.
How to Display Cisco IOS Skills on Your Resume
2. Juniper Junos
Junos OS runs across Juniper routing, switching, and security platforms. One consistent CLI, hierarchy-based configs, strong automation hooks, and rock-solid control-plane behavior.
Why It's Important
Unified operations across devices simplify deployment, troubleshooting, and scaling. Less inconsistency. More reliability.
How to Improve Juniper Junos Skills
Level up without guesswork:
Formal training: Use vendor courses and hands-on labs to cement fundamentals through advanced topics.
Hands-on practice: Build a lab with vMX/vSRX. Repeatedly configure routing, security policies, HA, and automation.
Automation: Learn PyEZ, JSNAPy for validation, Jinja2 templating, and Ansible/Salt for repeatable changes.
Operational excellence: Master commit confirmed, rollbacks, rescue configs, and commit scripts.
Stay current: Track release notes, known issues, and feature lifecycles. Standardize on stable trains.
Certify: JNCIA-Junos → JNCIS → JNCIP tracks validate breadth and depth.
Practice plus automation turns good engineers into force multipliers.
How to Display Juniper Junos Skills on Your Resume
3. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
BGP drives interdomain routing, selecting paths between autonomous systems. It’s the internet’s control-plane heartbeat and a common tool for traffic engineering inside large enterprises and service providers.
Why It's Important
It decides where your traffic goes on a global stage and within complex WANs. Stability and correctness here ripple everywhere.
How to Improve BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Skills
Control the blast radius, steer with intent, and secure the edge:
Filter ruthlessly: Prefix-lists, AS-path filters, and communities. Only accept and advertise what you mean to.
Max-prefix: Set sane thresholds to avoid routing table explosions.
Route reflectors: Replace iBGP full meshes cleanly. Document cluster-ids and reflection topologies.
Graceful features: Graceful restart, BFD for fast failure detection, and dampening (used sparingly) to tame flaps.
Origin validation: Deploy RPKI-based origin validation. Track adoption of ASPA for path authorization as it matures.
Communities for policy: Standardize community tags for traffic engineering, local-preference, and blackholing.
Observability: Monitor session health, route churn, and path changes. Alert on anomalies quickly.
Do these and BGP behaves—predictable, resilient, explainable.
How to Display BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Skills on Your Resume
4. OSPF (Open Shortest Path First)
OSPF is a link-state IGP used inside domains. OSPFv2 for IPv4, OSPFv3 for IPv6. Areas, LSAs, and SPF calculations keep routes fresh and paths short.
Why It's Important
It provides fast, scalable, and deterministic routing in large internal networks. When OSPF hums, outages shrink and convergence snaps.
How to Improve OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) Skills
Shape the topology; OSPF will reward you:
Sensible areas: Summarize at boundaries. Keep LSDBs small and ABR roles clear.
Timers and BFD: Tune hello/dead timers thoughtfully and add BFD for sub-second failure detection where needed.
Stub and NSSA: Use stub/NSSA to contain external routes and reduce churn.
Authentication: Enable per-neighbor authentication and consistent key rotation.
SPF tuning: Use SPF throttling and LSA pacing to prevent CPU spikes during instability.
Priority and DR/BDR: Control DR elections on multi-access segments to reduce surprises.
Telemetry: Track adjacencies, SPF runs, and LSA floods. Fix noisy links and misconfigured neighbors.
Good design plus good hygiene equals quick convergence and quiet logs.
How to Display OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) Skills on Your Resume
5. MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)
MPLS forwards packets using labels instead of long prefix lookups. It enables L3VPNs, traffic engineering, and fast reroute—core tools for deterministic WANs.
Why It's Important
It boosts performance and control across provider and large enterprise backbones, letting you steer flows, isolate tenants, and recover quickly from failures.
How to Improve MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) Skills
Make the fabric efficient and resilient:
Capacity planning: Baseline, forecast, and right-size links. Engineer headroom for bursts and failover.
QoS alignment: Map DSCP-to-LSP behaviors consistently edge to core. Validate end-to-end.
Traffic engineering: Use RSVP-TE where needed or consider Segment Routing (SR-MPLS) for simpler path control.
Fast reroute: Enable LFAs or TI-LFA with SR for rapid convergence.
Operational guardrails: Strict label/route filtering between domains, coherent IGP underlay, and health checks on PE-CE.
Instrumentation: Track LSP status, RSVP/SR state, latency, jitter, and loss. Alert on path changes.
Lifecycle discipline: Standard images, staged rollouts, and rollback plans keep the core boring—in a good way.
The result: predictable paths, fewer surprises, happier applications.
How to Display MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) Skills on Your Resume
6. IPv6
IPv6 brings a massive 128-bit address space, cleaner autoconfiguration, and improved routing aggregation. The modern internet expects it—so should your network.
Why It's Important
Address exhaustion is real. IPv6 supports growth, simplifies multihoming and summarization, and aligns with new services and platforms that prefer it.
How to Improve IPv6 Skills
Plan deliberately; deploy with care:
Address design: Hierarchical, aggregatable, and human-understandable. Reserve space for growth and DR. Document clearly.
Dual-stack strategy: Start dual-stack, then reduce IPv4 dependencies over time. Understand translation and tunneling only as temporary bridges.
Security posture: Build IPv6 firewall policies from day one. Don’t assume parity with IPv4 rules. IPsec is available but not automatic—configure intentionally.
Neighbor discovery hygiene: Tune RA/ND, use RA Guard and DHCPv6 Guard where appropriate.
Application testing: Validate app behavior, DNS records (AAAA), and logging/monitoring visibility end-to-end.
Operations: Train teams on IPv6 tooling, traceroute/ping nuances, and multi-address interfaces.
Monitoring: Ensure telemetry, flow records, and security sensors are IPv6-aware and enabled.
Do this and IPv6 stops being scary and starts being normal.
How to Display IPv6 Skills on Your Resume
7. Wireshark
Wireshark captures packets and lays them bare. When logs lie or metrics go vague, the wire tells the truth.
Why It's Important
It enables deep protocol analysis, sharp troubleshooting, and forensic clarity. You see what actually happened, not what dashboards suggest.
How to Improve Wireshark Skills
From noisy captures to crisp answers:
Filters fluency: Master capture and display filters. Save profiles for common workflows.
Protocol depth: Study the protocols you support—TCP, TLS, DNS, HTTP/2+, QUIC, BGP, OSPF. Decode fields with intent.
TShark and automation: Use TShark for CLI parsing, batch jobs, and CI pipelines.
Ring buffers and files: Capture long-running issues safely with rotating files and tight scopes.
Coloring rules: Highlight anomalies—retransmits, resets, malformed frames—at a glance.
Sanitization: Anonymize captures for sharing while preserving the useful bits.
Certification: Consider WCNA to formalize expertise and signal depth.
Precision matters. Wireshark turns hunches into proof.
How to Display Wireshark Skills on Your Resume
8. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
SNMP lets you query and receive traps from network devices. It’s the legacy workhorse for monitoring, still everywhere, still useful when handled carefully.
Why It's Important
It provides quick visibility into health, counters, and events across diverse gear. Lightweight and widely supported.
How to Improve SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) Skills
Make it safer and smarter:
Prefer SNMPv3: Use authentication and privacy. Retire v1/v2c where possible.
Access control: Restrict by source, views, and ACLs. Separate read from write. Isolate management networks.
Polling strategy: Tune intervals by device criticality and OID cost. Avoid synchronized polling bursts.
Trap hygiene: Consolidate, deduplicate, and prioritize traps. Alert on what matters, suppress the rest.
MIB discipline: Keep MIBs current. Standardize OIDs in dashboards and runbooks.
Transition plan: Where supported, add streaming telemetry (gNMI/NETCONF/RESTCONF) for high-scale metrics and reduce SNMP load over time.
Used well, SNMP is still effective. Used carelessly, it’s noise. Choose the former.
How to Display SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) Skills on Your Resume
9. QoS (Quality of Service)
QoS classifies, marks, queues, and polices traffic so important packets don’t drown in the flood. Latency-sensitive apps get fast lanes; bulk jobs wait their turn.
Why It's Important
Capacity is finite. Prioritization protects voice, video, and critical transactions when links run hot or paths degrade.
How to Improve QoS (Quality of Service) Skills
Design, verify, and iterate:
Classify at the edge: Mark DSCP where traffic starts. Don’t trust upstream markings blindly.
Queueing strategy: LLQ for real-time, fair-queue for mixed classes, and strict shaping for chatty flows.
Congestion control: Prefer modern AQM like FQ-CoDel or PIE over legacy RED where available.
Bandwidth math: Allocate per-class bandwidth with evidence—measure, don’t guess.
End-to-end consistency: Preserve markings across campus, WAN, and cloud. Translate only when necessary.
Validation: Use active probes, packet captures, and telemetry to confirm QoS behavior under load.
QoS is a control system. Tune it with measurements, not wishful thinking.
How to Display QoS (Quality of Service) Skills on Your Resume
10. VPN (Virtual Private Network)
VPNs create encrypted tunnels over untrusted networks. Site-to-site or remote access, IPsec or TLS—different tools for different jobs.
Why It's Important
They extend private networks securely, enabling remote work, partner connectivity, and multi-site resilience without exposing the core.
How to Improve VPN (Virtual Private Network) Skills
Harden the tunnel, speed the flow:
Protocol choice: For enterprise, favor IKEv2/IPsec or TLS-based VPNs. WireGuard and OpenVPN are strong options depending on platform support.
Crypto standards: Use modern ciphers, perfect forward secrecy, and sane lifetimes. Retire legacy suites.
Split tunneling: Enable where appropriate to reduce backhaul load. Document exceptions and risks.
Performance placement: Place gateways near users and applications. Leverage acceleration where available.
Access control: Pair with MFA, device posture checks, and granular authorization.
Monitoring: Track tunnel health, rekey events, throughput, and failure causes. Alert on spikes and drops.
Scale planning: Size for concurrency, crypto throughput, and bursts. Test failover and license limits.
User guidance: Clear setup docs, client updates, and security reminders reduce tickets and risk.
Done right, VPNs feel invisible and stay dependable.
How to Display VPN (Virtual Private Network) Skills on Your Resume
11. Firewall Configuration
Firewalls enforce policy at choke points. Rules and objects decide what gets in, what gets out, and what gets stopped cold.
Why It's Important
They’re the guardrails for north-south and east-west traffic. Good configs shrink attack surfaces and contain incidents.
How to Improve Firewall Configuration Skills
Clarity beats complexity:
Least privilege: Permit only what’s required. Default deny. Separate admin from data planes.
Object hygiene: Use address and service objects, groups, and naming standards. Prune unused entries.
Rule lifecycle: Expire temporary rules. Review and recertify policies regularly. Remove duplicates and shadowed rules.
Segmentation: Enforce zones and microsegments. Contain lateral movement and noisy broadcast domains.
Secure management: Encrypted access, MFA, source-restricted, and logged. No public management interfaces.
Egress controls: Don’t forget outbound rules. Limit destinations, ports, and protocols. Block known-bad.
Logging and SIEM: Log decisively. Parse, alert, and correlate with identity and endpoint data.
Testing: Validate with scans and targeted exercises. Verify IDS/IPS and decryption policies behave as intended.
A tidy policy set is faster to read, safer to change, and easier to defend.
How to Display Firewall Configuration Skills on Your Resume
12. Cloud Networking
Cloud networking stitches VPCs/VNets, on-prem, and services together using software-defined constructs. Think transit hubs, private endpoints, and policy as code.
Why It's Important
It delivers scale, resilience, and speed of change. Teams can build safely without hand-wiring every route and ACL by hand.
How to Improve Cloud Networking Skills
Bring rigor to the virtual world:
Architecture first: Standardize hub-and-spoke or mesh patterns. Use cloud routers/virtual WANs for controlled transit.
Security by design: Enforce zero-trust principles, private access (no public exposure by default), and inspect where it counts.
Observability: Enable flow logs, health probes, and synthetic tests. Centralize logs and metrics across accounts/subscriptions.
Automation: Use Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, ARM/Bicep, CloudFormation) and CI/CD for repeatable changes.
Resilience: Multi-AZ as a baseline; consider multi-region for critical paths. Test failover and data-plane behavior.
Performance: Use private peering, optimized gateways, and smart egress patterns. Keep an eye on quotas and limits.
Cost controls: Tag, budget, and right-size. Avoid surprise data transfer bills with clear egress patterns.
Done well, cloud networking feels boringly reliable. That’s the goal.
How to Display Cloud Networking Skills on Your Resume
