Top 12 Network Technician Skills to Put on Your Resume

Networks hum and hiccup. Technicians keep them sane. A sharp resume anchored by real, proven skills puts you at the front of the line—showing you can configure, harden, and fix fast when the lights flicker. The stack keeps shifting, so your toolkit needs depth, not just buzz. Let’s map what matters and how to sharpen it.

Network Technician Skills

1. Cisco IOS
2. Juniper Junos
3. TCP/IP
4. VLAN Configuration
5. OSPF
6. BGP
7. MPLS
8. Wireshark
9. IPv6
10. SNMP
11. Firewall Management
12. VPN Configuration

1. Cisco IOS

Cisco IOS (Internetwork Operating System) runs on most Cisco routers and switches. It controls routing, switching, security, and the CLI you live in every day.

Why It's Important

IOS is where configuration meets uptime. It’s the place to shape policy, troubleshoot in seconds, and lock doors before someone knocks. Reliability, speed, and safety—right from the console.

How to Improve Cisco IOS Skills

1. Run recommended releases: Track advisories and upgrade on a cadence. Security fixes and stability updates matter.
2. Tune the data plane: Enable CEF, clean up unused features, and prune noisy protocols. Less churn, more throughput.
3. Harden access: AAA with role-based privilege, SSH only, secure management VRFs, and control-plane policing. Disable legacy services.
4. Standardize templates: Build golden configs, enforce naming and logging standards, and store versioned backups.
5. QoS with intent: Classify, mark, and police where needed. Protect real-time traffic without starving bulk flows.
6. Observable by default: SNMPv3, secure syslog, and NetFlow/IPFIX. Baselines catch trouble early.
7. Practice break/fix: Lab changes first. Know your rollback path and keep out-of-band access alive.

With discipline and repeatable patterns, IOS turns predictable—and fast.

How to Display Cisco IOS Skills on Your Resume

2. Juniper Junos

Junos OS powers Juniper routers, switches, and security appliances. One operating system, a consistent CLI, and a configuration style that scales neatly.

Why It's Important

Consistency pays off. Junos makes large environments manageable, scriptable, and less error-prone. Strong separation of config and state reduces surprises.

How to Improve Juniper Junos Skills

1. Learn the hierarchy: Commit, rollback, candidate vs active configuration—master the workflow.
2. Automate early: Use PyEZ, Ansible, and NAPALM for safe, repeatable changes.
3. Lab it out: Spin up vLabs or local virtual devices. Build muscle memory before production.
4. Investigate show commands: Pipe, match, display set, display json. Powerful parsing makes triage faster.
5. Secure the box: Root authentication, SSH, NETCONF, and appropriate class permissions. Lock down management.
6. Stay current: Track release notes and recommended code trains. Document deviations and why.

Junos rewards precision. Treat configs like code and your changes get safer—and quicker.

How to Display Juniper Junos Skills on Your Resume

3. TCP/IP

TCP/IP is the backbone of how data moves. TCP handles reliable delivery and flow control; IP handles addressing and routing. Everything else rides on top.

Why It's Important

When packets stall, you need to read the symptoms. Understanding windows, retransmissions, PMTUD, and routing behavior is the difference between guessing and knowing.

How to Improve TCP/IP Skills

1. Right-size MTU: Jumbo frames help only if the whole path supports them. Verify end-to-end or don’t do it.
2. Window and congestion control: Modern stacks (CUBIC, BBR) can lift throughput on high-latency links. Test before broad rollout.
3. Offloads with caution: LRO/GRO/TSO/Checksum offload can reduce CPU load; confirm your tools still see accurate packet details.
4. QoS where it counts: Mark, queue, and police. Protect voice/video without hurting control traffic.
5. Kill latency: Short paths, fewer stateful hops, ECN where possible, and smart queuing defeat bufferbloat.
6. Harden the path: IPsec or MACsec where appropriate, sane TTLs, and tight ACLs. Stability improves when noise is removed.
7. Measure relentlessly: Baseline RTT, jitter, loss, and throughput. Correlate changes with metrics, not hunches.

Deep protocol fluency turns strange failures into solvable puzzles.

How to Display TCP/IP Skills on Your Resume

4. VLAN Configuration

VLANs carve one physical network into many logical segments. Clean separation reduces noise, contains faults, and supports policy boundaries.

Why It's Important

Broadcast storms shrink. Lateral movement gets harder. Change control becomes saner. With VLANs, you shape traffic into lanes instead of chaos.

How to Improve VLAN Configuration Skills

1. Plan and name clearly: Reserve ID ranges, document purpose, and avoid VLAN 1 for anything sensitive.
2. Prune trunks: Only allow required VLANs across trunks. Prevent needless flooding and mismatches.
3. Mind the native VLAN: Set an unused native VLAN and match it everywhere. Mismatches bite hard.
4. Use private VLANs and VACLs: Isolate hosts on shared segments and enforce intra-VLAN policy.
5. Voice/data split: Separate voice VLAN with QoS markings. Keep call quality predictable.
6. Be careful with VTP: Prefer transparent mode unless you fully control the domain and versioning.
7. Observe continuously: Monitor MAC tables, STP topology, and err-disabled ports. Fix flaps quickly.

Tidy segmentation pays dividends in security and speed.

How to Display VLAN Configuration Skills on Your Resume

5. OSPF

OSPF is a link-state routing protocol that calculates shortest paths and adapts quickly as links change. It supports areas, summarization, and IPv4/IPv6.

Why It's Important

Inside an enterprise, OSPF balances scale and speed. It converges fast, contains churn, and gives you clear levers for control.

How to Improve OSPF Skills

1. Design with areas: Keep backbones clean, summarize at ABRs, and avoid giant flat domains.
2. Right-size timers: Tune hello/dead and enable BFD on critical links for snappy failure detection.
3. Shape the cost: Set interface costs intentionally to direct traffic and prevent surprises.
4. Use stub/NSSA wisely: Reduce LSA noise where full tables aren’t needed.
5. Passive where appropriate: Don’t form adjacencies where you shouldn’t. Less chatter, fewer risks.
6. Authenticate: Message integrity prevents rogue updates. Use strong methods.
7. Mind OSPFv3: For IPv6, use OSPFv3 and take advantage of its improvements.

Good OSPF design feels calm even when links blink.

How to Display OSPF Skills on Your Resume

6. BGP

BGP moves reachability between autonomous systems and across large internal domains. It’s policy-based, scalable, and bluntly honest about the internet’s messy reality.

Why It's Important

Without BGP, the internet doesn’t stitch together. With it, you choose paths, enforce policy, and protect your prefixes from chaos.

How to Improve BGP Skills

1. Filter everything: Prefix-lists, route-maps, and AS-path filters on both eBGP and iBGP. Only announce and accept what you intend.
2. Origin validation: Deploy RPKI Route Origin Validation where supported to reduce hijacks and mistakes.
3. Scale sanely: Use route reflectors, communities, and aggregation. Avoid full-mesh headaches.
4. Set clear policy: Local-pref, MED, and communities to steer traffic. Tag routes; act on tags.
5. Defend sessions: GTSM (TTL security), MD5/AoTH auth, max-prefix limits, and dampening when appropriate.
6. Keep it resilient: Graceful restart, add-path where needed, and BFD for quicker failure detection.
7. Watch it live: Export BMP to collectors or monitor with telemetry. Alert on flaps, path changes, and prefix count swings.

BGP done right is strict, explicit, and documented.

How to Display BGP Skills on Your Resume

7. MPLS

MPLS forwards packets by labels, not lookups, so paths can be engineered and VPNs scaled without constant control-plane strain.

Why It's Important

Traffic engineering, predictable latency, and clean multi-tenant separation—MPLS underpins serious WANs and provider cores.

How to Improve MPLS Skills

1. Pick the right signaling: LDP for simplicity, RSVP-TE when you must pin paths. Document why.
2. QoS end-to-end: Map classes to EXP/TC bits consistently so performance guarantees actually hold.
3. Protect the core: Fast reroute, ECMP, and redundant P/PE nodes. Failure domains should be small.
4. Sync IGP and labels: Avoid blackholes with IGP-to-LDP/RSVP synchronization and careful metric design.
5. Secure the control plane: Auth, RT filters, and strict PE-CE policies. No surprises from customers or peers.
6. Consider Segment Routing: Where hardware supports it, SR-MPLS simplifies state and unlocks flexible traffic steering.

Plan capacity, monitor label-switched paths, and keep change windows tight.

How to Display MPLS Skills on Your Resume

8. Wireshark

Wireshark dissects packets. You capture, filter, and decode protocols to see exactly what moved, when, and why.

Why It's Important

When logs are vague, packets tell the truth. Wireshark turns finger-pointing into proof.

How to Improve Wireshark Skills

1. Use capture filters: Reduce noise at the source. Save disk, sharpen focus.
2. Master display filters: Build surgical views. Color rules highlight the weird quickly.
3. Timestamp and timing: Set consistent time sources, mark time references, and analyze gaps, jitter, and latency.
4. Decrypt when allowed: TLS with key logs, 802.11 with PSK—legal and approved only. Hidden problems often sit in the handshake.
5. Ring buffers and rotation: Continuous captures without filling disks. Great for intermittent issues.
6. Know your surroundings: Disable name resolution for speed, capture on the right side of NAT, and mirror the correct VLANs.

Packets don’t lie. Learn to read their dialects.

How to Display Wireshark Skills on Your Resume

9. IPv6

IPv6 brings abundant addressing, cleaner neighbor discovery, and modernized behaviors. It’s not the future—it’s here.

Why It's Important

New services, IoT sprawl, and public reachability demand it. Dual-stack today eases tomorrow’s cutover.

How to Improve IPv6 Skills

1. Addressing with intent: Plan aggregates, reserve per-site blocks, and keep interface IDs consistent. Document everything.
2. Run dual-stack: Transition gracefully. Ensure parity with IPv4 policies and monitoring.
3. Protect first-hop: RA Guard, DHCPv6 Guard, and SAV/uRPF. Stop spoofing before it spreads.
4. Harden hosts and edges: IPv6 ACLs, proper ICMPv6 handling (don’t break PMTUD), and clear DNS strategy (AAAA everywhere needed).
5. Use DHCPv6-PD: Hand scalable prefixes to edge devices and remote sites. Fewer one-off configs.
6. Train and test: Validate apps, proxies, and load balancers. Watch logs for v6-only surprises.

Make IPv6 first-class, not an afterthought.

How to Display IPv6 Skills on Your Resume

10. SNMP

SNMP monitors and manages devices remotely. Poll counters, receive traps, and keep an eye on health without logging into every box.

Why It's Important

Visibility prevents outages. With solid telemetry, you spot weak links before they snap.

How to Improve SNMP Skills

1. Use SNMPv3 only: Auth and privacy. Retire v1/v2c except for isolated legacy pockets.
2. Restrict access: Tight ACLs to managers, unique users, and minimal privileges. Separate management VRFs.
3. Trim the MIB surface: Poll what you need at sane intervals. Over-polling creates its own problems.
4. Trap with purpose: Define trap receivers, throttle storms, and correlate with syslog and flow data.
5. Automate backups: Pull configs on change, version them, and alert on diffs.
6. Plan a path forward: Evaluate streaming telemetry (gNMI/NETCONF) for higher fidelity and lower overhead.

SNMP still works—use it wisely, then evolve.

How to Display SNMP Skills on Your Resume

11. Firewall Management

Firewall management is policy, posture, and proof. You configure rules, validate outcomes, and watch the logs like a hawk.

Why It's Important

The firewall is often the last gate. Good management keeps doors open for business and shut to attackers.

How to Improve Firewall Management Skills

1. Principle of least privilege: Default deny. Permit with purpose, by application and identity where possible.
2. Lifecycle your rules: Owners, review dates, and hit counts. Retire stale entries relentlessly.
3. Harden the box: Patch firmware, lock management access, multi-factor for admins, and strong logging.
4. Segment smartly: Create zones and microsegments. Limit blast radius and lateral movement.
5. Inspect where it helps: TLS inspection for sanctioned apps (with privacy controls), bypass the unsniffable when it risks breakage.
6. Automate change: Use templates and approvals. Test in staging, push safely, and verify with policy checks.
7. Monitor outcomes: Correlate denies, detect rule shadowing, and alert on policy drift.

Clarity beats complexity. The best rulesets read like intent, not archaeology.

How to Display Firewall Management Skills on Your Resume

12. VPN Configuration

VPNs create encrypted tunnels so remote users and sites can talk safely over untrusted networks.

Why It's Important

Remote work, branch connectivity, and third-party access rely on it. Misconfigure once and the whole path leaks.

How to Improve VPN Configuration Skills

1. Choose modern protocols: IKEv2/IPsec or WireGuard for most cases. Retire PPTP and L2TP without IPsec.
2. Strong authentication: Certificates and MFA. Limit shared secrets, rotate keys, and bound trust to device posture.
3. Scope access tightly: Split-tunnel or full-tunnel with intent. ACLs and security groups enforce least privilege.
4. Harden DNS: Encrypted DNS where appropriate and internal resolvers for corporate domains. Prevent leaks.
5. Stability settings: DPD, rekey timers, and redundant gateways. Keep sessions alive without lingering forever.
6. Performance matters: Place gateways near users, enable hardware crypto, and prioritize critical classes with QoS.
7. Audit continuously: Logins, durations, geo anomalies, and failed attempts. Review and remediate quickly.

Secure, reliable tunnels should feel invisible. That’s the goal.

How to Display VPN Configuration Skills on Your Resume