Top 12 Network Specialist Skills to Put on Your Resume

In the rapidly evolving field of information technology, network specialists stand at the forefront, ensuring seamless connectivity and security. To set yourself apart in this competitive landscape, showcase a robust, current set of skills on your resume—evidence you can wrangle complexity, stabilize chaos, and keep packets flowing when the pressure spikes.

Network Specialist 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. Wireshark
8. QoS (Quality of Service)
9. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
10. VPN (Virtual Private Network)
11. Firewall Configuration
12. Cloud Networking

1. Cisco IOS

Cisco IOS (Internetwork Operating System) runs on most Cisco routers and many switches, providing a consistent interface and command set for configuration, management, automation, and operations.

Why It's Important

Cisco IOS anchors a massive share of enterprise and service provider networks. Mastery lets you build, harden, automate, and troubleshoot reliably at scale.

How to Improve Cisco IOS Skills

Sharper, safer, faster—aim for all three.

1. Stay on stable trains: Track recommended releases, read release notes, and plan upgrades methodically. Security advisories aren’t optional reading.

2. Harden the control plane: Enforce AAA with role-based CLI views, use SSHv2, disable legacy services, deploy CoPP, and lock down management interfaces.

3. Design clean configs: Standardize with templates, golden baselines, and IaC tooling (e.g., Ansible/NETCONF/NAPALM). Consistency kills drift.

4. Prioritize what matters: Shape, police, and queue with QoS so critical apps don’t starve when links surge.

5. Observe everything: Centralize syslog, NetFlow/IPFIX, and model‑driven telemetry. A network management system and good dashboards surface trouble early.

6. Test before change: Use labs and change windows. Validate rollback paths. Document. Then validate again.

7. Simplify: Fewer features, fewer failure modes. Avoid clever when simple will do.

Focused practice across security, automation, and observability turns IOS from “familiar” into “formidable.”

How to Display Cisco IOS Skills on Your Resume

2. Juniper Junos

Junos OS powers Juniper routing, switching, and security platforms. One architecture, one CLI style, heavy on reliability and automation-friendly design.

Why It's Important

A unified operating system across platforms makes consistency real—less guesswork, faster changes, fewer surprises.

How to Improve Juniper Junos Skills

Make Junos sing with disciplined operations.

1. Keep current: Plan OS lifecycles, stage upgrades, read PR (problem report) notes, and snapshot before you leap.

2. Exploit Junos strengths: Use candidate configuration, commit confirmed, rescue configs, and groups for clean, reversible changes.

3. Automate: Drive changes with Ansible or Python (PyEZ), and push telemetry instead of polling where possible.

4. Harden: NETCONF over SSH, granular firewall filters, secure management access, and clear separation of routing instances.

5. Measure and tune: RPM probes, event policies, and detailed logs help you catch degradation before users notice.

6. Build a lab habit: Replicate topologies, rehearse failure, and codify known-good patterns.

Strong Junos practices reduce toil and amplify reliability.

How to Display Juniper Junos Skills on Your Resume

3. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)

BGP is the Internet’s interdomain routing protocol. It advertises reachability between autonomous systems and decides which paths traffic should take across a sprawling global mesh.

Why It's Important

Without BGP, there is no Internet as we know it. With it, you can engineer traffic, isolate incidents, and keep routes sane under pressure.

How to Improve BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Skills

1. Filter ruthlessly: Enforce prefix-lists and maximum-prefix limits. Validate customer routes against IRR data and RPKI. Stop leaks at the edge.

2. Scrub path info: AS-path filters, communities, and policy guardrails prevent loops and bad policy from spreading.

3. Handle damping with care: Most networks avoid route flap damping today; if you must use it, follow conservative parameters (per modern guidance) to dodge collateral damage.

4. Use communities well: Standard and Large Communities enable clean traffic engineering and controllable propagation.

5. Deploy RPKI: Publish ROAs and enable origin validation so hijacks and fat‑fingered prefixes get dropped at the door.

6. Protect sessions: TCP MD5 or TCP-AO, GTSM (TTL security), control‑plane policing, and strict neighbor definitions. Peer-groups reduce drift.

7. Tune convergence: Fast external fallover, BFD, and multipath ECMP where appropriate.

8. Watch the table: Real‑time monitoring, route collectors, and alerting for anomalies (sudden de-aggregation, path changes, leaks).

9. Practice incidents: Simulate leaks and outages. Know your playbooks. Document policy intent.

Good BGP is equal parts policy hygiene, security, and visibility.

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

4. OSPF (Open Shortest Path First)

OSPF is a link-state IGP for IPv4 and IPv6. It computes shortest paths with Dijkstra’s algorithm and adapts quickly when topology shifts.

Why It's Important

Inside an autonomous system, OSPF provides fast convergence, structured scaling with areas, and robust route distribution.

How to Improve OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) Skills

1. Design hierarchically: Keep Area 0 tight, use additional areas to contain churn, and avoid oversized LSDBs.

2. Summarize smartly: Summarize at ABRs and ASBRs to shrink tables and shield instability.

3. Set sane metrics: Tune reference bandwidth, interface costs, and hello/dead timers to balance convergence and stability.

4. Trim adjacencies: Prefer point‑to‑point links, avoid unnecessary neighbors on broadcast segments, and steer clear of virtual links unless there’s no alternative.

5. Secure the protocol: Use authentication (OSPFv2) and IPsec for OSPFv3 where supported; protect the control plane.

6. Accelerate failure detection: Pair OSPF with BFD for sub‑second detection on critical paths.

7. Keep it tidy: Passive interfaces where appropriate, LSA throttling, and regular config reviews.

Clean area design plus disciplined tuning yields quiet stability.

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

5. MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)

MPLS forwards traffic using labels instead of long lookups, enabling VPNs, fast reroute, and precise traffic engineering across large backbones.

Why It's Important

It’s the backbone workhorse for many service providers and large enterprises—consistent performance, flexible VPNs, and engineered paths that keep latency predictable.

How to Improve MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) Skills

1. Engineer the paths: Use RSVP‑TE or Segment Routing with SR‑TE to steer flows around congestion and meet SLAs.

2. Build resilience: Fast reroute (LFA/TI‑LFA) and redundant head/merge points slash recovery times when links fail.

3. QoS end‑to‑end: Map classes consistently from access to core so voice, video, and transactional traffic get what they need.

4. Choose your control plane wisely: LDP where simple works, Segment Routing where scale and programmability matter.

5. Harden: Limit label distribution, protect the control plane, and control TTL propagation to contain surprises.

6. Monitor VPN health: L3VPNs and L2VPNs deserve active probing, telemetry, and route/label sanity checks.

7. Audit often: Verify path diversity, label stacks, and TE constraints match design intent. Document changes.

When MPLS is tuned well, traffic behaves. Even on a bad day.

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

6. IPv6

IPv6 expands address space to 128 bits and brings cleaner autoconfiguration, better extension handling, and modernized network operations. The future isn’t future anymore—it’s here.

Why It's Important

Address exhaustion is real, and IPv6 unlocks scale, simplifies routing, and removes brittle NAT crutches.

How to Improve IPv6 Skills

1. Plan addressing: Hierarchical, aggregated prefixes; reserve for growth; document. Prefer DHCPv6‑PD at edges, use SLAAC or DHCPv6 where it fits.

2. Transition sensibly: Start dual‑stack, then move targeted domains to IPv6‑only with NAT64/DNS64 when ready.

3. Secure the lane: RA Guard, DHCPv6 Guard, ND inspection where available. Mirror IPv4 firewall policy with IPv6 parity—no blind spots.

4. Harden hosts and apps: Ensure logging, ACLs, and IDS/IPS all speak IPv6. Disable unused transition mechanisms.

5. Monitor: Flow records, telemetry, and synthetic tests for IPv6 paths. MTU mismatches and ICMPv6 filtering can sting—test them.

6. Keep it simple: Avoid NAT66, keep addressing stable (privacy addresses on endpoints as needed), and prefer DNS over hardcoded literals.

Run IPv6 deliberately and it runs you less.

How to Display IPv6 Skills on Your Resume

7. Wireshark

Wireshark is the de facto protocol analyzer. Capture packets, dissect conversations, and surface what logs gloss over.

Why It's Important

When symptoms don’t add up, packet truth does. Root cause hides in headers and timings; Wireshark reveals both.

How to Improve Wireshark Skills

1. Filter like a pro: Master display vs. capture filters, craft reusable filter sets, and build fast‑read column profiles.

2. Automate the grind: Use tshark for batch work, ring buffers for long captures, and scripts or Lua dissectors when repetition creeps in.

3. Decode securely: Where policy allows, use keys for TLS decryption in labs to understand handshakes, ciphers, and failures.

4. Time is everything: Examine TCP flows, retransmissions, and out‑of‑order segments. Correlate with app logs to pinpoint the slow hop.

5. Protocol depth: Learn the quirks of DNS, HTTP/2+, QUIC, SIP, and common tunneling. Know what “normal” looks like.

6. Practice in a sandbox: Recreate incidents, capture clean baselines, and annotate traces. Build your own library.

Turn captures into narratives. That’s the real skill.

How to Display Wireshark Skills on Your Resume

8. QoS (Quality of Service)

QoS shapes and prioritizes traffic so the right packets win when links get crowded.

Why It's Important

Latency‑sensitive and mission‑critical applications need guarantees. QoS provides them, or at least a fighting chance.

How to Improve QoS (Quality of Service) Skills

1. Define classes that matter: Map business outcomes to technical classes. Fewer, clearer classes beat sprawling taxonomies.

2. Mark at the edge: Establish trust boundaries. Classify and remark early; don’t trust endpoints blindly.

3. Shape and police: Smooth bursts with shaping; cap noisy flows with policing. Right tool, right direction.

4. Queue with intent: LLQ for real‑time traffic, weighted queues for the rest. Avoid starvation with fair scheduling.

5. Manage congestion: Use modern AQM where available (e.g., PIE/CoDel). Be cautious with WRED unless you understand the traffic mix.

6. Keep it end‑to‑end: Align markings and behaviors across domains you control. Across the open Internet, assume DSCP won’t be honored.

7. Measure relentlessly: Jitter, loss, latency, tail drops, queue depths. Tune, test, repeat.

QoS isn’t set-and-forget; it’s a continuous tuning exercise.

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

9. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)

SNMP offers a standard way to monitor, alert, and sometimes configure network devices. Old but widespread, and still useful.

Why It's Important

Uniform metrics and traps across mixed vendors make visibility possible without a tangle of one‑off integrations.

How to Improve SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) Skills

1. Prefer SNMPv3: AuthPriv where possible. Retire v1/v2c. Rotate credentials and isolate managers.

2. Control access: Views, ACLs, and dedicated management VRFs or interfaces. Rate‑limit queries and trap storms.

3. Standardize MIB use: Focus on consistent OIDs and translate vendor quirks into normalized metrics.

4. Filter traps: Use informs for reliability, throttle noisy events, and correlate with syslog/telemetry.

5. Patch and prune: Keep agents updated; disable SNMP entirely on devices that don’t need it.

6. Plan the future: Where available, augment SNMP with streaming telemetry for low‑latency, high‑fidelity data.

Secure the protocol, trim the noise, and your monitoring gets sharper fast.

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

10. VPN (Virtual Private Network)

VPNs create encrypted tunnels over untrusted networks, linking users and sites as if they were on the same private fabric.

Why It's Important

Remote work. Partner access. Site‑to‑site mesh. Without strong tunnels, sensitive data wanders naked.

How to Improve VPN (Virtual Private Network) Skills

1. Pick solid protocols: IKEv2/IPsec, OpenVPN, or WireGuard. Favor modern ciphers (AES‑GCM or ChaCha20‑Poly1305) and perfect forward secrecy.

2. Tune the path: Right MTU/MSS, UDP acceleration where supported, and gateways close to users to chip away at latency.

3. Split with intent: Split tunneling reduces load—but do it by policy, not guesswork. Protect what must stay inside.

4. Harden access: MFA for clients, device posture checks, short‑lived credentials, and strict ACLs behind the tunnel.

5. Scale out: Load‑balance concentrators, use HA pairs, and monitor concurrent sessions, throughput, and crypto offload.

6. Avoid compression: Compression alongside encryption can introduce side‑channels; most deployments should keep it off.

7. Consider the next step: For app‑level access, evaluate ZTNA/SSE patterns that narrow trust even further.

Fast, safe, and observable tunnels—or nothing.

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

11. Firewall Configuration

Firewalls enforce policy: what gets in, what gets out, and who talks to whom. The rules are the guardrails.

Why It's Important

Strong policy stops opportunistic attacks, limits blast radius, and keeps auditors from raising eyebrows.

How to Improve Firewall Configuration Skills

1. Baseline and inventory: Know every zone, interface, object, and rule. Remove the fossils. Comment aggressively.

2. Least privilege: Default‑deny, both ingress and egress. Permit only what’s needed, scoped tightly to identity, ports, and destinations.

3. Segment: Zone‑based and microsegmentation reduce lateral movement. Enforce app‑layer policies where possible.

4. Secure management: Dedicated management networks, MFA, IP allow‑lists, and change control. No Telnet. Ever.

5. Log like you mean it: Centralize logs to a SIEM, alert on forbidden attempts and rule shadowing, and retain for forensics.

6. Review and test: Quarterly rule recertification, policy simulations, and periodic penetration tests. Back out what no longer serves.

7. Keep current: Firmware updates, signature packs for IDS/IPS, and validated backups of config and licenses.

8. Design for resilience: HA pairs, state synchronization, and documented failover drills.

Clarity beats complexity. Great firewalls tell a simple, strict story.

How to Display Firewall Configuration Skills on Your Resume

12. Cloud Networking

Cloud networking stitches VPCs/VNets, regions, and on‑prem locations into one secure, scalable fabric—software‑defined, API‑driven, globally reachable.

Why It's Important

Apps live everywhere now. The network has to follow, and it has to be fast, safe, observable, and automated.

How to Improve Cloud Networking Skills

1. Architect the core: Hub‑and‑spoke with transit gateways or virtual WAN constructs. Centralize inspection and route control.

2. Use private paths: Direct connect equivalents to data centers, plus private service endpoints to keep traffic off the public Internet.

3. Enforce layered policy: Security groups/NSGs, NACLs, cloud firewalls, and WAFs. Identity‑aware access beats static allow‑lists.

4. Plan for multi‑region: Active‑active or warm standby, with health‑based failover and data replication patterns you’ve actually tested.

5. Embrace IPv6: First‑class support in cloud fabrics simplifies addressing and future‑proofs growth.

6. Observe relentlessly: Flow logs, packet mirroring, synthetic probes, and golden signals on dashboards tied to alerts that wake the right people.

7. Automate everything: IaC for networks (Terraform/Pulumi), policy‑as‑code, drift detection, and change pipelines with guardrails.

8. Mind the bill: Egress, NAT, data transfer, and inspection hops add up. Design with cost visibility from day one.

Great cloud networks are boring in production and exciting in the lab. Aim there.

How to Display Cloud Networking Skills on Your Resume