Ask an experienced network engineer what changed most over their career and the answer is rarely a protocol. BGP and OSPF behave much as they always did. What moved is where the work happens: a branch is now a policy pushed from a controller, a remote worker connects through a cloud security service, and half the traffic leaves for AWS or Azure without touching a data centre. The network engineer skills that hold their value are the fundamentals, now applied through software, alongside a far closer relationship with security.
Hiring teams face a particular trap here, because vendor certificates and command recall are easy to test and say little about how someone behaves with a live estate. Below you will find eight core skills with a practical test for each, the habits behind dependable engineers, how the role is shifting, a matrix across levels and a process for assessing all of it.
Core technical skills for a network engineer
IP addressing and summarisation
Careful address planning prevents problems years later. Good engineers leave room for growth, group ranges so that routes summarise cleanly, and keep records in an IPAM system instead of a spreadsheet nobody trusts. How to check it: give them a branch whose /24 is almost full and whose neighbouring ranges are already allocated. Ask for options and the side effects of each. Strong answers weigh a new non-contiguous range against renumbering, and mention what happens to route summaries and firewall objects.
Layer 2 resilience
Spanning tree still protects most campus networks, and it fails in ways that take a whole floor down. Skilled engineers place the root bridge deliberately, know how link aggregation across two switches changes the picture, and protect access ports. How to check it: say that someone plugged a small unmanaged switch into two wall ports and the floor went down. Ask why, and what should have stopped it. Listen for loops, broadcast storms, BPDU guard and storm control.
BGP policy
Running a BGP session is the easy part. The skill lies in shaping traffic and stopping mistakes from spreading, using prefix filters, maximum prefix limits, local preference and AS path prepending, with an understanding of RPKI route validation at larger edges. How to check it: describe a company with two providers, where most inbound traffic arrives over the more expensive link. Ask what they can control. Good engineers separate outbound, which you decide, from inbound, which you can only influence, and they explain why prepending is a request and not a command.
Firewall policy lifecycle
Writing a rule takes minutes, while keeping a rule base clean takes discipline. On Palo Alto this means App-ID based policy instead of port lists, and on Fortinet it means disciplined use of policies, objects and profiles. How to check it: share an anonymised rule base containing a shadowed rule, a temporary rule with no owner and a broad allow. Ask which they would tackle first and how they would prove removal is safe. Hit counts, a monitoring period and a tested rollback should all feature.
SD-WAN operations
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and Fortinet Secure SD-WAN both steer applications across links according to measured quality. The difficult case is a link that stays up while performing badly. How to check it: say that a branch has two links, the primary is up but losing packets, and video calls are breaking. Ask what the SD-WAN should do and how they would choose thresholds. Good answers discuss application-aware policy and probes, and the risk of traffic flapping between links if thresholds are too tight.
Packet analysis
Someone who can read a capture can end the argument over whether the network is at fault. Wireshark and tcpdump remain the deciding tools. How to check it: hand over a short capture from a slow application containing TCP zero window messages from the server. Ask where the fault lies. A capable engineer will see that the receiver cannot keep up, so the network is probably innocent, and will explain how they would present that to the application team.
Network automation
Repeating a change across a large fleet by hand invites errors. Engineers now use Python with Netmiko or NAPALM, Ansible, device APIs and Git for configuration history. How to check it: ask how they would change the NTP servers on every device in a large estate. Then ask what happens if the job fails halfway. Look for a pilot group, a verification step and a clear record of which devices changed.
Hybrid and cloud connectivity
Offices increasingly reach workloads over AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute or Google Cloud Interconnect, frequently with a VPN as backup. How to check it: describe a private link with a VPN backup to the same cloud network, where return traffic takes the wrong path. Ask how they would determine which route wins. Strong candidates look at advertised prefixes, route priority on the cloud side and BGP attributes, and they check both directions.
Working skills that separate good from average
- Proving innocence politely. The network gets blamed first. Strong engineers respond with evidence, not defensiveness, and they stay involved until the real cause is found, even when it belongs to another team.
- Keeping documentation true. Diagrams drift within weeks unless someone cares. Good engineers update them as part of a change, because they know the person reading at night during an outage may be themselves.
- Managing carriers. Provider faults need clear evidence, firm escalation and a good ticket history. An engineer who can move a carrier along shortens outages that no configuration could fix.
- Weighing risk against urgency. A business will always want the rule opened today. Good engineers ask what the access is for, offer a narrower version and record why, so that security and delivery both keep moving.
Network engineering skills that matter more in 2026, and less
Mattering more. Zero Trust thinking has moved access decisions away from the location of a device, so engineers need to understand ZTNA and SASE services and how they sit alongside existing firewalls. Segmentation has grown in importance because ransomware spreads sideways through flat networks. Automation and API literacy now appear in ordinary mid-level work. AI assistants can draft configurations and summarise logs, which makes careful review a daily duty, since a confident wrong access list can do real damage. Logging and time synchronisation also deserve attention in India, where CERT-In directions set expectations on log retention and incident reporting.
Mattering less. Dedicated MPLS expertise still has its place at larger enterprises, though internet-first SD-WAN has reduced how many engineers need it. Building individual site-to-site tunnels by hand matters less when a controller builds the overlay. Logging into each box to make the same edit should be seen as a habit to retire, and memorising command syntax for its own sake adds little when documentation and assistants sit one window away.
Network engineer skills matrix by level
| Skill area | Junior | Mid-level | Senior |
|---|---|---|---|
| Addressing | Subnets accurately, follows the plan | Plans ranges for a site | Owns the estate-wide scheme, including IPv6 |
| Switching | Adds VLANs, protects access ports | Designs campus redundancy | Sets campus and data centre standards |
| Routing | Reads tables, follows paths | Runs OSPF and provider BGP | Designs routing policy and failure behaviour |
| Firewalls | Raises rule requests properly | Owns policy and clean-up on one platform | Designs segmentation across the estate |
| SD-WAN and WAN | Monitors sites, logs provider faults | Runs policies and failover | Plans migrations and carrier strategy |
| Troubleshooting | Follows a method, escalates cleanly | Reads captures, solves multi-device faults | Resolves the hardest cross-team problems |
| Automation | Uses existing scripts | Writes scripts and playbooks | Builds change pipelines and source of truth |
| Communication | Clear ticket notes | Writes change plans others can run | Explains risk to leaders and vendors |
How to assess network engineering skills in a hiring process
Start from a clear brief. The network engineer job description helps you set that out and handle early screening, and the steps below test what remains. Use your own vendors where you can.
- Critique an old design. Bring a redacted diagram of a real site and ask what they would worry about first. Single points of failure, unclear ownership and undocumented links all make good talking points, and this shows how they think without a console.
- Ask for an evidence trail. Pick a past incident from their CV, then ask what data proved the cause. Those who solved it will recall the counters or capture that settled things, while those who watched from nearby will speak in generalities.
- Test a platform move. For a candidate strong on Cisco, ask how they would approach a Fortinet task they have never done. You are looking for concepts mapped across vendors and a sensible use of documentation.
- Write the message to the business. Ask for a short note to non-technical staff explaining a planned outage.
Red flags on a CV: certifications with no named environment; a list of every vendor with no sense of scale; “managed network” with no mention of sites, devices or users; and security claims with no firewall platform attached.
Frequently asked questions
Can someone learn network automation without becoming a developer?
Yes. Most useful automation is modest: reading device state, generating configuration from a template and checking the result. Basic Python, Git and one tool such as Ansible will go a long way, and engineers who understand the network often write better automation than developers who do not.
Does experience on one vendor transfer to another?
The concepts do, though the syntax and management tools differ. A strong Cisco engineer can become productive on Fortinet or Palo Alto, but firewall depth specifically takes time to build. If a migration is imminent, prefer someone who has already worked on your target platform.
Will SASE reduce the need for network engineers?
It changes what they do more than whether they are needed. Someone still has to design routing to the service, plan for its failure modes, manage policy and troubleshoot user experience across networks you no longer own. Campus and data centre networks also stay in place.
Is IPv6 knowledge necessary yet?
It depends on the estate, but it is worth checking at senior level. Many Indian mobile networks carry heavy IPv6 traffic and cloud providers support it widely, so public-facing services increasingly meet it. Candidates should at least understand addressing, neighbour discovery and dual-stack behaviour.
Our screening focuses on hands-on work, with certifications such as CCNP weighed alongside it, so talk to Zilo AI when you need to hire network engineers in India on contract, contract-to-hire or permanent terms. The wider IT talent hub covers neighbouring security roles. Share your topology and carrier mix with us, along with the change you most want to get right.