Top 12 Senior Network Administrator Skills to Put on Your Resume

In today's crowded IT arena, a Senior Network Administrator’s resume has to flash both depth and dexterity. Technical chops, yes. Judgment, documentation finesse, and calm under fire, absolutely. Put your most relevant skills front and center and hiring managers stop skimming and start reading.

Senior Network Administrator 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. VMware NSX
8. AWS Networking
9. Azure Networking
10. Python (for network automation)
11. Ansible
12. Wireshark

1. Cisco IOS

Cisco IOS (and IOS XE/IOS XR variants) powers Cisco routers and switches, delivering routing, switching, security, and automation interfaces that keep enterprise networks steady and controllable.

Why It's Important

It’s the backbone software on a massive slice of enterprise gear. Reliable operations, consistent configuration, and rich protocol support hinge on it, daily.

How to Improve Cisco IOS Skills

1. Stay current: Standardize on stable, supported releases; plan upgrades; track PSIRTs and advisories.

2. Harden access: Use SSH with modern ciphers, role-based access, TACACS+/RADIUS, secure SNMPv3, strict ACLs.

3. Simplify configs: Remove unused services, unify templates, apply structured naming and descriptions, and document intent.

4. Automate: Drive changes with NETCONF/RESTCONF, EEM for event actions, and templating. Use model-driven telemetry for visibility.

5. Prioritize traffic: Apply QoS marking, queuing, and policing where it matters; verify with show commands and telemetry.

6. Design for resiliency: Fast convergence with BFD, FHRP tuning, equal-cost multipath, and well-chosen timers.

7. IPv6 ready: Dual-stack where needed, enforce RA Guard/ND protections, and maintain parity with IPv4 policy.

8. Audit routinely: Config drift checks, compliance baselines, and golden images.

How to Display Cisco IOS Skills on Your Resume

2. Juniper Junos

Junos OS provides a consistent, modular platform across Juniper routers, switches, and security devices, with a clean, transactional CLI and strong automation hooks.

Why It's Important

Predictable syntax, commit/rollback safety, and programmatic interfaces make Junos a favorite for large, change-heavy networks that need discipline and speed.

How to Improve Juniper Junos Skills

1. Exploit commits: Use commit confirmed, commit check, and rollback. Treat changes like transactions.

2. Automate natively: Leverage Junos automation with PyEZ, event/Op scripts, and Junos RPCs.

3. CoS done right: Define classes, schedulers, and rewrite rules to protect critical flows.

4. Secure the control plane: Apply firewall filters, system services lockdown, and proper authentication.

5. Visibility: Sample flows, enable streaming telemetry, and baseline KPIs. Catch drift early.

6. Modernize the toolchain: Consider intent-based overlays (e.g., Apstra for DC EVPN) when scale or repeatability is the problem.

How to Display Juniper Junos Skills on Your Resume

3. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)

The Internet’s postal service. BGP exchanges reachability between autonomous systems and steers traffic with policy, not just distance.

Why It's Important

Without BGP, no global routing. With it, you shape paths, ensure redundancy, and keep your prefixes honest and visible.

How to Improve BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Skills

1. Security first: Enforce RPKI/ROV for origin validation; deploy max-prefix limits, prefix filters, and strict bogon controls. Use TCP-AO or MD5 and TTL security for sessions where appropriate.

2. Stronger hygiene: Advertise only what you own. Tag with communities, use NO_EXPORT/NO_ADVERTISE when needed, and leverage large communities for granular policy.

3. Faster convergence: Tune keepalive/hold timers prudently; add BFD for sub-second failure detection; enable graceful restart and long-lived graceful restart judiciously.

4. Policy engineering: Adjust LOCAL_PREF, AS_PATH prepends, and MED. Aggregate routes to cut table bloat.

5. Operational guardrails: Route damping only when justified; log and monitor session state, updates, and anomalies; use route-leak detection where supported.

6. Evolving protections: Track ASPA developments and incremental path-security features as they mature.

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

4. OSPF (Open Shortest Path First)

Link-state IGP for your domains. OSPF and OSPFv3 handle complex topologies with areas, fast convergence, and rich extensions.

Why It's Important

It scales inside large enterprises, converges quickly, and supports clean hierarchy so change ripples don’t swamp the whole network.

How to Improve OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) Skills

1. Design with areas: ABRs, clear boundaries, and summarization keep LSDBs trim.

2. Tame the chatter: Right-size hello/dead timers; use LSA pacing and throttling to avoid micro-storms.

3. Use stubs wisely: Stub/NSSA where external routes add no value; cut noise without losing reachability.

4. Harden adjacency: Authentication (MD5/SHA), passive interfaces, and interface filtering where appropriate.

5. Speed up failure handling: BFD for fast detection; loop-free alternates (LFA/remote LFA/TI-LFA) if your platform supports them.

6. Embrace OSPFv3: Address families for IPv4/IPv6 under one roof; consistent policy, less duplication.

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

5. MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)

MPLS forwards packets by labels, not deep lookups, enabling engineered paths, fast failover, and clean separation of services.

Why It's Important

Predictable latency, VPN isolation, and carrier-grade scale. It’s traffic engineering you can reason about.

How to Improve MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) Skills

1. Modernize control: Prefer Segment Routing (SR-MPLS) where feasible; simplify LDP/RSVP sprawl and enable SR-TE for explicit paths.

2. Engineer traffic: Map classes to paths with QoS and constraints; headroom matters, per-hop shaping and policing do too.

3. Strengthen VPN design: Use route-target discipline, RT-Constrain, and summarization at edges to keep tables lean.

4. Fast reroute: TI-LFA or LFA for sub-50ms recovery when links or nodes vanish.

5. Observe relentlessly: MPLS OAM, synthetic probes, path liveliness checks, and streaming telemetry to catch jitter before users do.

6. Secure the core: TTL propagation rules, control-plane policing, and tight label distribution boundaries.

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

6. IPv6

IPv6 expands addressing to 128 bits and brings cleaner neighbor discovery, better autoconfiguration, and room for everything.

Why It's Important

Address exhaustion is real. Modern services, mobile-first networks, and cloud fabrics rely on IPv6 at serious scale.

How to Improve IPv6 Skills

1. Plan the space: Hierarchical allocation, nibble-aligned prefixes, and documentation that ages well.

2. Dual-stack with purpose: Migrate by domain; validate parity for routing, security, and monitoring. Explore IPv6-only segments where viable.

3. Secure ND: RA Guard, DHCPv6 Guard, SAV for source validation, and consistent ACL policy across v4/v6.

4. Addressing policy: SLAAC vs DHCPv6, stable privacy addressing where logs and audits matter.

5. Transitional tactics: NAT64/DNS64 when legacy dependencies persist; keep it scoped and measured.

6. Operational visibility: IPv6-ready flow logs, telemetry, and app monitoring—no blind spots.

How to Display IPv6 Skills on Your Resume

7. VMware NSX

NSX delivers software-defined networking and distributed security: overlays, micro-segmentation, and automation baked into the data center stack. Today that means NSX (formerly NSX-T).

Why It's Important

Security close to the workload, rapid provisioning, and network constructs that travel with apps across clusters and clouds.

How to Improve VMware NSX Skills

1. Nail the underlay: Stable MTU, ECMP-friendly leaf-spine, and clean routing domains. Troubles less; deploy faster.

2. Micro-segmentation with intent: Start coarse, iterate to least privilege. Use tags, groups, and policy tiers consistently.

3. Federation and mobility: Standardize segments, T1/T0 design, and services so multi-site doesn’t sprawl.

4. Observe and adapt: Flow visibility, app dependency mapping, and policy recommendations to shrink the blast radius.

5. Lifecycle discipline: Regular upgrades, interop validation with hypervisors and NVAs, and rollback plans that actually work.

How to Display VMware NSX Skills on Your Resume

8. AWS Networking

AWS offers VPCs, routing, security controls, private connectivity, global acceleration, and content delivery—plus a growing set of advanced services for large-scale, hybrid networks.

Why It's Important

You stitch cloud to campus and data center. Performance, resilience, and cost control depend on the choices you make here.

How to Improve AWS Networking Skills

1. VPC architecture: Use multiple AZs, sane CIDR planning, and subnet isolation. Prefer IPv6-only subnets where practical.

2. Hub-and-spoke: Centralize with Transit Gateway; standardize attachments, route domains, and segmentation.

3. Private connectivity: Direct Connect for predictable latency and throughput; resilience with link and location diversity.

4. Security layers: Security groups, NACLs, AWS Network Firewall, Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, and strict egress controls.

5. Traffic handling: Gateway Load Balancer for NVAs, Global Accelerator for global apps, and CloudFront for edge delivery.

6. Service-to-service: PrivateLink and VPC Lattice to simplify east-west service access and policy.

7. Observability: VPC Flow Logs (latest format), Traffic Mirroring for deep dives, CloudWatch and CloudWatch Logs metrics and alarms.

8. Cost awareness: Watch NAT Gateway, inter-AZ traffic, data egress, and centralized inspection patterns.

How to Display AWS Networking Skills on Your Resume

9. Azure Networking

Azure delivers VNets, load balancers, firewalls, WAN hubs, Private Link, DNS, and traffic tools, all wired to global infrastructure.

Why It's Important

Reliable hybrid connectivity, managed security, and global scale—without losing operational grip.

How to Improve Azure Networking Skills

1. Topology with intent: Azure Virtual WAN for hub-and-spoke at scale, or bespoke hubs when you need granular control.

2. Control plane clarity: Route Server for dynamic BGP with NVAs; consistent UDR strategy to avoid hairpins.

3. Security posture: Azure Firewall Premium, DDoS Protection, NSGs with application tags, and Private Link for service isolation.

4. Global entry: Front Door or Traffic Manager for global routing and acceleration; pick per-app requirements.

5. Govern and monitor: Azure Virtual Network Manager for policy and topology, Network Watcher and Azure Monitor for diagnostics and baselines.

6. Throughput and HA: Accelerated Networking on NICs, zone-redundant gateways, and ECMP-friendly designs.

How to Display Azure Networking Skills on Your Resume

10. Python (for network automation)

Python glues your network together—scripting device changes, parsing data, and orchestrating workflows with readable, testable code.

Why It's Important

Repeatable changes, fewer fat-finger mistakes, faster rollouts. One script, many devices, consistent outcomes.

How to Improve Python (for network automation) Skills

1. Pick the right tools: Netmiko/scrapli for CLI, NAPALM for abstraction, pyATS/Genie for testing, Nornir for inventory-driven workflows.

2. Think async: asyncio and concurrency patterns for scale without chaos.

3. Speak API: REST, NETCONF, RESTCONF, and gNMI. Schemas matter; embrace data models.

4. Engineer the codebase: PEP 8, type hints, logging, exceptions, and config files separated from code. Small modules, clear tests.

5. Version everything: Git for code, tags for releases, branches for safety. Pull requests and code reviews.

6. Sandbox often: GNS3/EVE-NG/containers and vendor sandboxes. Test first, blast radius later.

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

11. Ansible

Ansible automates configuration, provisioning, and compliance with human-readable YAML and a deep library of network modules and collections.

Why It's Important

Consistency across fleets. Idempotent changes you can trust. Fewer late-night rollbacks.

How to Improve Ansible Skills

1. Structure matters: Roles, inventories, and group_vars. Keep playbooks small and purposeful.

2. Use Collections: Vendor network collections for native APIs and best practices baked in.

3. Secrets handled right: Ansible Vault or an external secrets manager; no credentials in plain sight.

4. Speed and scale: Strategy plugins, async/poll, and connection reuse. Target changed devices only.

5. Quality gates: Molecule tests, linting, and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins).

6. Event-driven: Explore Event-Driven Ansible for remediation on signals from monitoring.

7. Source of truth: Integrate with NetBox or similar to drive intent and inventory.

How to Display Ansible Skills on Your Resume

12. Wireshark

Wireshark captures traffic and peels it open. Packets tell stories—of latency, loss, bugs, and breaches.

Why It's Important

When logs go vague, packets don’t. Deep inspection finds subtle protocol errors and strange behavior fast.

How to Improve Wireshark Skills

1. Filter fluency: Master capture and display filters. Build profiles for different hunts (VoIP, TLS, DC traffic).

2. Command-line chops: TShark for automation, scheduled captures, and headless environments.

3. Decode more: Custom dissectors (Lua) for oddball protocols; TLS key log files for decryption in controlled tests.

4. Performance sleuthing: Follow TCP streams, examine windows, SACKs, retransmits, and jitter metrics.

5. Security mindset: Spot beaconing, DNS tunneling hints, and malformed packets. Pivot with PCAP exports to other tools when needed.

6. Clean capture strategy: Right tap/SPAN, MTU correct, timestamp accuracy, and filters at capture to avoid noise.

How to Display Wireshark Skills on Your Resume