Top 12 Network Operations Manager Skills to Put on Your Resume

The network never sleeps. Neither should your resume. A modern Network Operations Manager needs range: deep protocol chops, automation fluency, sharp observability instincts, and a bias for resilient design. Highlight the skills that keep packets honest and outages short, and do it with precision.

Network Operations Manager Skills

1. Cisco IOS
2. Juniper Junos
3. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
4. MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)
5. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
6. Wireshark
7. SolarWinds
8. VMware NSX
9. Python (for automation)
10. IPv6
11. QoS (Quality of Service)
12. SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN)

1. Cisco IOS

Cisco IOS (and IOS XE) powers most Cisco routers and switches, delivering routing, switching, and security features that glue enterprise networks together.

Why It's Important

IOS is the control plane heartbeat for Cisco gear. Stable code, sane configurations, and hardened access decide whether your infrastructure hums or hiccups.

How to Improve Cisco IOS Skills

1. Run trustworthy code: Standardize on tested train releases, track vulnerabilities, and keep an upgrade calendar. Include rollback plans.

2. Tighten the guardrails: Enforce role-based access, TACACS+/RADIUS, secure management (SSHv2, HTTPS), logging, and AAA accounting. Disable unused services.

3. Automate consistency: Use templated configs and golden baselines. Back up configs automatically. Diff early, diff often.

4. Instrument the platform: Turn on model-driven telemetry and syslog with clear severity thresholds. Use Embedded Event Manager for self-healing actions.

5. Prioritize critical flows: Apply QoS policies with precision: classification, marking, queuing, and policing matched to application reality.

6. Document everything: Standard naming, interface descriptions, IP schemas, and change notes reduce drift and downtime.

How to Display Cisco IOS Skills on Your Resume

2. Juniper Junos

Junos OS delivers a clean, transactional CLI and robust routing features across Juniper routers, switches, and security platforms.

Why It's Important

Operational consistency. Candidate configs. Strong policy framework. Junos helps large networks stay predictable and scalable.

How to Improve Juniper Junos Skills

1. Adopt best-practice architecture: Hierarchical configuration, groups, apply-groups, and commit checks to enforce standards.

2. Automate at the edge and core: Lean on PyEZ, Ansible, or Nornir to push intent-driven changes and validate state.

3. Harden management: Limit system services, enable SSH, use secure syslog, lock down root, and require multifactor for admin paths.

4. Optimize routing policy: Use policy-options for reusable terms, protect with max-prefix, MED/LOCAL_PREF rules, and graceful restart where appropriate.

5. Stay current: Maintain code alignment across pods, track release notes, and test upgrades in a lab before production rollout.

How to Display Juniper Junos Skills on Your Resume

3. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)

BGP is the Internet’s routing lingua franca, trading routes between autonomous systems and steering traffic across vast networks.

Why It's Important

Control, resilience, and cost discipline. BGP lets you shape paths, build redundancy, and keep transit bills sane.

How to Improve BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Skills

1. Filter ruthlessly: Prefix-lists, AS-PATH filters, communities. Only accept and advertise what you intend. Enforce max-prefix.

2. Validate origins: Deploy RPKI-based Route Origin Validation to cut down on hijacks and fat-fingered announcements.

3. Secure sessions: Use MD5 where available and TTL security (GTSM) for eBGP. Isolate peering VLANs. Limit who can talk to port 179.

4. Stability with care: Avoid blanket route flap damping on the public Internet; use selectively and test impact. Graceful restart and BFD can help convergence.

5. Scale paths: Enable multipath ECMP when traffic patterns benefit. Consider add-path to improve path diversity.

6. Watch everything: Export BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) to collectors, baseline churn, and alert on session resets and path anomalies.

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

4. MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)

MPLS forwards packets by labels, not long lookups, enabling fast L3VPNs, traffic engineering, and deterministic paths in carrier and large enterprise networks.

Why It's Important

Predictable latency, scalable VPNs, and clean separation of customer traffic. MPLS still underpins serious WANs, even as SD-WAN rides above.

How to Improve MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) Skills

1. Engineer the underlay: Use MPLS TE or segment routing (SR-MPLS) to steer critical flows around congestion and meet SLAs.

2. Build redundancy: Fast reroute and diverse paths keep outages brief. Test failover, don’t just model it.

3. Shape and police: Apply hierarchical QoS across core and PE edges so voice and interactive apps don’t drown at peak.

4. Observe the fabric: Monitor LSP health, RSVP/SR states, and VPN route scales. Trend label space and control-plane CPU.

5. Modernize where it counts: Migrate from RSVP-TE to SR-TE where feasible to simplify control planes and improve scale.

6. Coordinate with providers: If you buy MPLS, review CoS mappings, jitter/latency targets, and escalation paths quarterly.

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

5. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)

SNMP gathers metrics and sends alerts from network devices. It’s old, widespread, and still useful when tuned and secured.

Why It's Important

Uptime depends on seeing trouble early. SNMP provides device health, interface stats, and traps that warn before users notice.

How to Improve SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) Skills

1. Prefer SNMPv3: Authentication and encryption are non-negotiable for management planes.

2. Right-size polling: Calibrate intervals and timeouts to cut noise and avoid needless load.

3. Trap with intent: Enable traps for meaningful events only; map them to actionable alerts.

4. Segment and restrict: Isolate management networks, limit source IPs, and control access with ACLs.

5. Keep MIBs tidy: Standardize OIDs you care about. Retire legacy ones that no longer matter.

6. Embrace telemetry: Where supported, augment SNMP with streaming telemetry (model-driven, gNMI/gRPC) for higher frequency, structured data.

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

6. Wireshark

Wireshark captures and dissects packets, turning wire chatter into answers.

Why It's Important

When dashboards lie or metrics smear the truth, packet captures settle the argument. Root cause, in black and white.

How to Improve Wireshark Skills

1. Master filters: Build precise display and capture filters, save profiles, and use coloring rules to surface patterns quickly.

2. Tame the firehose: Use ring buffers, time slices, and capture on the right interfaces to keep files manageable.

3. Decode more: Feed in private keys or session secrets when appropriate to analyze encrypted flows in lab or approved scenarios.

4. Correlate: Align time references across traces, enable name resolution carefully, and annotate findings as you go.

5. Automate the tedious: Script with tshark and Lua for repeatable parsing and export of KPIs.

6. Practice on real faults: Build a capture library of known issues—MTU mismatches, TCP resets, asymmetric routing—to accelerate future triage.

How to Display Wireshark Skills on Your Resume

7. SolarWinds

SolarWinds offers monitoring, alerting, mapping, and reporting across networks and systems.

Why It's Important

Single-pane visibility shrinks mean time to innocence and mean time to repair. Strong alert hygiene keeps teams focused.

How to Improve SolarWinds Skills

1. Tune for signal: Curate alerts, deduplicate events, add suppression windows, and use dependency-aware alerting.

2. Optimize the backend: Maintain database indexes, set sane retention, and scale pollers as you grow.

3. Build role-focused views: Custom dashboards for NOC, network engineering, security, and leadership—each with the metrics they need.

4. Automate responses: Trigger scripts or webhooks for routine remediations and ticket creation with context.

5. Harden the platform: Patch promptly, isolate management servers, enforce least privilege, and forward audit logs to your SIEM.

How to Display SolarWinds Skills on Your Resume

8. VMware NSX

NSX brings network virtualization and micro-segmentation to the data center, delivering software-defined switching, routing, and distributed firewalling.

Why It's Important

Security lives closer to the workload. NSX enforces policy at the vNIC, speeds provisioning, and simplifies segmentation at scale.

How to Improve VMware NSX Skills

1. Design first: Document tiering, overlay/underlay boundaries, and security intent before you click anything.

2. Micro-segmentation that matters: Start with application dependency mapping, then write least-privilege rules. Iterate after real traffic reviews.

3. Operational clarity: Standardize naming, tags, and groups. Use sections and rule categories to keep policies readable.

4. Observe and troubleshoot: Leverage traceflow, port mirroring, and flow analytics. Baseline east-west traffic before enforcing.

5. Keep pace with releases: Align on supported versions, test upgrades in a lab, and track feature deprecations or licensing changes.

How to Display VMware NSX Skills on Your Resume

9. Python (for automation)

Python glues systems together. For networks, it drives configuration, checks state, and orchestrates changes without tedium.

Why It's Important

Fewer typos, faster rollouts, consistent outcomes. Automation shrinks toil and raises reliability.

How to Improve Python (for automation) Skills

1. Get the foundations right: Virtual environments, packaging, logging, error handling, and type hints for maintainability.

2. Use the right libraries: Netmiko, NAPALM, Paramiko, PySNMP, requests, and asyncio for concurrency against APIs.

3. Frameworks for scale: Ansible or Nornir for inventory-driven workflows; Jinja2 for templating; pytest for tests.

4. Guard your secrets: Store credentials in vaults, not code. Rotate them. Audit usage.

5. Ship like software: Version control, code review, linters, pre-commit hooks, CI pipelines, and staged rollouts.

6. Measure impact: Add idempotence checks and post-change validation to prove success, not hope for it.

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

10. IPv6

IPv6 expands address space, streamlines routing, and modernizes network features long constrained by IPv4.

Why It's Important

Address exhaustion is over. End-to-end reachability returns. Future services and devices need IPv6 to breathe.

How to Improve IPv6 Skills

1. Plan addressing with care: Allocate by function and location, not whim. Keep documentation crisp, hierarchical, and future-proof.

2. Dual-stack smartly: Run IPv4 and IPv6 together during transition. Validate parity for routing, QoS, security, and monitoring.

3. Secure the new lanes: RA Guard, DHCPv6 Guard, first-hop security, and proper firewalling. Don’t assume IPv4 rules cover you.

4. Know your provisioning: SLAAC, DHCPv6, or both. Pick based on operational visibility and control needs.

5. Design for IPv6-only: Where possible, use NAT64/DNS64 at the edge to simplify. Fewer stacks, fewer headaches.

6. Test everything: MTU, PMTUD, tunnels, application readiness, and monitoring tools that truly support IPv6.

How to Display IPv6 Skills on Your Resume

11. QoS (Quality of Service)

QoS is the art and craft of deciding which packets wait and which get the velvet rope.

Why It's Important

Critical apps need low jitter and latency. Bulk transfers can slow their roll. QoS makes the trade-offs explicit—and enforceable.

How to Improve QoS (Quality of Service) Skills

1. Classify at the edge: Mark DSCP correctly and early. Protect markings in transit, or re-mark intentionally.

2. Queue with purpose: Low-latency queues for voice, fair queuing for general traffic, and explicit shaping for bursty flows.

3. Control congestion: Prefer modern AQM (like FQ or PIE) where supported; WRED remains useful on long-fat pipes.

4. Think end-to-end: WAN, campus, Wi‑Fi (WMM), and data center must align. One weak link spoils the promise.

5. Validate continuously: Synthetic tests, real-user monitoring, and per-class KPIs. Adjust policies as traffic evolves.

6. Document contracts: Translate business criticality into traffic classes and SLOs. No class without an owner.

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

12. SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN)

SD-WAN steers traffic across multiple transports with central policy and application awareness, often tied into broader SASE strategies.

Why It's Important

Cloud apps, hybrid work, and Internet underlays demand agility. SD-WAN delivers performance, visibility, and cost control across the sprawl.

How to Improve SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN) Skills

1. Engineer the underlays: Diverse circuits—broadband, DIA, 5G, and private lines—measured and baselined before you trust them.

2. Route by experience: Use application-aware policies, dynamic path selection, brownout detection, FEC, and packet duplication where it pays off.

3. Unify security: Integrate with SASE or SSE components—SWG, CASB, ZTNA, and cloud firewalls—under a single policy model.

4. Automate deployment: Zero-touch provisioning, templated sites, and intent-based policies keep rollouts fast and consistent.

5. Observe relentlessly: Per-app telemetry, path health, and user experience metrics. Close the loop with policy adjustments.

6. Plan for failure: Test blackouts and brownouts, validate failover timers, and rehearse incident runbooks.

How to Display SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN) Skills on Your Resume