5 Network Engineer Resume Samples That Worked in 2023

Network Engineer Resume Format

A network engineer resume should be a professional, cumulative reflection of your qualifications and relevant work experience. As a network engineer, you need a complete summary of your career, thus far, in a logical, legible format. Several questions you should ask yourself and steps you can take to guarantee readability and rational structure are:

• Should you use a reverse-chronological, functional, or combination/hybrid format for your network engineer resume?

• How should your resume contact header look?

• How can you get through the ATS?

Should you use a reverse-chronological, functional, or combination/hybrid format for your network engineer resume?

To make your network engineer resume impactful in 2023, technical recruiters rely on clean formatting to quickly dissect your resume. Strong action verbs and quantifying your projects are just a few qualities that make a great resume. Without structure, a recruiter may struggle to decipher your comprehensive list of skills from your education or active projects. Feel free to review our example resumes, formatting guides, and resume templates for quick tips. Below we’ve detailed popular formats:

• The

  most popular format is reverse-chronological order

  . Reverse-chronological formatting lists all experience, from the most recent project or career opportunity to your first relevant skill or experience. Each item is typically dated to give perspective of your career path. You’ll likely have a straightforward career growth path that distinctly aligns with the reverse-chronological formatting.

• A functional resume groups career experience and relevant details based on a specific skill or focus.

• The mixture of both formats is considered a hybrid/combination. Many recruiters prefer a hybrid format if you have career gaps or relevant work experience spread throughout your career path. Organizing your most relevant job-specific career experience in reverse-chronological order gives the recruiter a better understanding of when you learned your skills and what depth you possess knowledge in the subject matter.

Your resume contact header

Your contact information should be one of the first things a hiring director reads on your resume. The information should be easy to find, color-coordinated, and titled but also self-explanatory. Other titles showing details such as social media pages, phone numbers, or addresses should be bold or emphasized. Keep font style and size consistent with the other equally important, relevant work experience displayed on your network engineer resume. To separate the content of your resume title, name, and contact information, a header is formed at the top of the page. The header shouldn’t exceed the standardized page margins. You can check out our resume examples to set your best foot forward!

How can you get through the ATS?

ATS stands for applicant tracking system. Applicant tracking system (ATS) software filters through resumes submitted to technical recruiters to simplify their hiring process. Each resume is typically collected from the submission window, sorted, scanned, and ranked for future readers. A whopping 90+% of top employers in every field and Fortune 500 company uses ATS software. Our resume builder can help remove the guesswork when crafting your resume!

ATS software is a common tool to reduce the hours and overhead required to review potential applicants. However, your network engineer resume may be ranked or disqualified before a human ever reads it due to ATS software. Our resume builder system is ATS compliant by default. You’ll have the flexibility to include relevant career experiences in a structured format that works for any future employer’s ATS software. Here are the main attributes an ATS reviews:

• Fonts

• Font sizes

• Margins

• Header names

• Structure / Logical order

• Resume page length

Writing Your Network Engineer Resume

Effective writing helps your network engineer resume shine in comparison to the competition. Word choice convinces hiring managers that you can make a measurable difference in their company. Your words shouldn’t leave the reader impression that your resume is just an exhaustive list of skills or expertise. Instead, it should be carefully crafted and focused on the specific position available. Our resume builder can guide you through these details!

• Must you include an objective or summary in your network engineering resume?

• Network engineer work experience

• The best network engineer skills

• Education and certifications required for a network engineer

• What about projects, interests, or hobbies in your network engineering resume?

• Create multiple network engineering resumes

• Edit your network engineering resume using our

  how-to-write-a-resume guide

Must you include an objective or summary in your network engineering resume?

You may write an objective or summary to help tailor your network engineer resume to a particular open role. However, not all resumes include an objective or summary. To save space or simplify, include this information in your cover letter. Nevertheless, it’s quintessential that you do so correctly if you choose to write an objective or summary. A poor objective or summary is commonly vague or generic.

Check out these examples:

• Good Objective—Harvard computer science graduate with web design experience looking to expand my 11-year web development career at Squarespace to help simplify the online shop creation process for small business owners.

• Bad Objective—I’d like to improve my Full-Stack web development capabilities for a year before branching into bleeding-edge technology such as artificial intelligence at Alphabet.

• Good Summary—Industry-leading executive with 10 years of experience broadening the electric vehicle market. In 2011, founded and grew a start-up into a $1 billion evaluation.

• Bad Summary—Joined a hot start-up and procured necessary investors to grow the company into an industry leader. Graduated with an MBA in 2010.

A strong objective specifies your intent or shares focused, relevant work experience that applies to the open role. Objectives should display who you are, what you have to offer the employer, and how you can help further the company’s accomplishments and goals. A good summary establishes the cumulative highlights of your relevant work experience with just a few sentences, quantitative values, and keywords. It explains the specific skills and expertise that make you the right choice for a particular job.

Network engineer work experience

Depending on the extent of your career thus far, not all previous opportunities should be listed on your network engineer resume. A common mistake is submitting a curriculum vitae (CV) instead of the requested resume. The difference is that you should tailor your resume to the employer’s open position with two to four relevant job experiences showing you’re the right fit for the position. Only highlight your most impactful education, experience, and expertise on your resume. Avoid including unrelated work history or irrelevant skills.

A CV contains the course of life or all qualifications you’ve achieved thus far. A resume is typically one page. However, for every 10 years of experience, you can include an additional page. On the other hand, a CV commonly has no length limitations.

Network engineering job descriptions

Each paragraph, phrase, or bullet point needs to be carefully crafted. You’ll be ranked not only by your experience but the effort you invested in describing your career journey. Use action verbs to capture the reader’s attention. From subjects to verbs, each part of speech needs to flow smoothly, tenses should remain consistent, and the vernacular should actively engage the reader. Listed below are good bullet points:

• Grew a software consultant business from $100 million in annual revenue to $150 million

• Acquired WordPress to further Automattic’s global web market share by 27%, leading to 300 million new users and 1 billion advertisement views monthly

• Transitioned from a hardware specialist intern to a full-time employee based on 3 months of high performance, 95% positive customer feedback, and academic merit, resulting in test scores consistently above a 3.5 GPA

Avoid personal pronouns and keep the language formal. Grammatically correct sentences are mandatory. Include certifications and academic accomplishments in a separate section from your work experience. Here are some bad bullet points:

• I built a web framework with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as front-end for several clients’ websites.

• I wrote lots of C++ code to automate desktop virtualization environments for a dozen small business office computers.

• Apple sponsored my CompTIA Network+ certification through their work-study program.

Numbers speak louder than words on your network engineering resume

Quantifying work experience with statistics and measurable metrics helps employers understand the extent of your work. Metrics provide an additional layer of detail that gives greater insight into your accomplishments. Aim to include a statistic or metric concerning work in every other sentence.

Quality bullet point examples for your resume:

• Discuss your network up-time to show your presence’s impact on co-workers or clients.

  • Maintained 99% up-time for all 100 networked client systems throughout the year 2020

• Outline ongoing or completed projects you participated in, including details regarding equipment used or replaced.

  • Spearheaded office-wide migration to fiber-optic connectivity and upgraded all 50 routers to Wi-Fi 6E, which led to consistent internal traffic data speeds above 100MBps

• Highlight the outcome of your accomplishments and how they affected the overall bottom line or customer relationship.

  • Achieved a 90% approval rating by decreasing the day-to-day customer support maintenance response time by 50%

The best network engineer skills

Several qualities make up an excellent network engineer. Employers tend to measure your potential based on the number of hard skills listed on your network engineer resume. They may uncover soft skills from brief interviews and references. Hard skills and academic-based expertise are pieces of knowledge you acquire from certifications, degrees, research, or experience. Often recruiters or the ATS will flag resumes for further review if you mention keywords, skills, or expertise specifically relevant to the open position. Examples of hard skills:

Soft skills measure character and can help assess compatibility with the existing team. The skills measure interpersonal relationship expertise and character traits. Both soft and hard skills should be mentioned on your network engineer resume six to eight times. The keywords should be listed either in the objective summary or highlighted in a separate section of the resume to increase reader visibility. Examples of soft skills:

• Adaptability

• Communication skills

• Teamwork

• Work ethic

• Interpersonal skills

• Leadership skills

Education and certifications required for a network engineer

Many companies in the market differ in terms of requirements for education. However, most open network engineering roles will demand a minimum of a bachelor’s degree in a relevant science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) field. Some companies will make an exception, allowing you entrance with an associate’s degree or four years of relevant work experience. However, most entry-level positions prefer STEM-related four-year degrees. In addition to academics, employers may also require standardized industry certifications, such as Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), CCNA Routing and Switching Certification (CCNA RS), CCNA Security, or CompTIA Network+.

All your related network engineering education and certifications should be clearly stated and displayed on a designated section of your network engineer resume. If a mandatory certification is a keyword in an ATS filter, you could be automatically rejected for forgetting to include this qualification on your resume. Most technical recruiters prefer to read this information first, as certifications and levels of education can be the deciding factor for hire. Senior positions look for 5-10 years of experience or post-graduate STEM degrees.

What about projects, interests, or hobbies on your network engineering resume?

As you gather more professional experience as a network engineer, listing projects, interests, and hobbies on your network engineering resume becomes less impactful. However, for interns, recent college graduates, and entry-level positions, displaying proactive applications of your knowledge can show initiative. Projects that have generated meaningful change or profit should be displayed. A great example is school projects, volunteer work, or home labs. If you’ve acquired a collection of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, 5G networks, or artificial intelligence, the expertise gained from each project is worth mentioning for germane roles.

Details of skills, expertise, and pre-existing technologies should be mentioned in your resume when applying to entry-level positions early on in your career. Projects, active or completed, can be listed, similar to work and career experience. Code contributions, open-source projects, and charity work are excellent additions to your resume. Like career experience, all hobbies, interests, and projects should display metrics and statistics concerning completed objectives. As a network engineer, you should describe how you improved the current system or changed the architecture leveraged by its users.

Examples of projects you could include: 

As your network engineering career becomes vast, it’s more than acceptable to disregard interests, projects, or hobbies from your resume entirely. Your work experience is commonly seen as the most important or beneficial asset to getting hired. Frequently, the duration of your work with various companies will lead to many completed projects and tasks. It’s up to you to include the most pertinent details of your assignments. Before submitting a resume, you should review each bullet point and ask, “What value does this sentence add to my resume?” “Does it display new information?” If there’s any hesitation or sense of repetition, the phrase or paragraph should be removed.

Create multiple network engineering resumes

Any job listing will show the required skills and expertise for hire. Read through the entire open position, highlight any skills you currently possess, and then ensure this information is near the top of your network engineer resume. Customize your resume to each employer and the needs of the specific role. Taking the time to tailor your resume greatly increases a hiring manager’s chances to consider you over the competition.

Edit and proofread your network engineering resume

While many word processing programs have built-in spell-check, it’s apropos for you to proofread any document for grammatical errors. To avoid having your network engineer resume rejected for poorly written language:

1. Avoid rushing an application for submission. 

2. Research the proper nouns, subjects, and objects listed in your document. 

3. Review formatting and margin requirements from the employer. 

4. Use our

   free resume checker

   to write out numbers versus listing numerical values.

 A proofread and tailored resume shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes if you work from a solid foundation.

Network Engineer Resume FAQs

1. Should you add certifications to your network engineer resume?

Yes, and especially so if the job description of the company you’re hoping to land a job with explicitly states you need a specific certification(s) like a CCNA Routing and Switching Certification (CCNA RS), which is common for entry-level network engineers, or a Palo Alto Networks Certified Network Security Administrator (PCNSA), a cert that’s more intermediate. To top it off, go ahead and list certifications you hold that the job listing didn’t mention. For instance, a company probably doesn’t require you to hold a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) certification, but showing you have such a prestigious cert can only help!

2. How do you choose skills for a network engineer resume?

In your highly technical role, you’re not short on network engineer skills, but you don’t have room to list them all. Checking a company’s job description is your best possible move here. For example, if a company’s job description repeatedly mentions troubleshooting and working in the cloud, it’s wise to keep that top of mind when building your skills list. For those, it’d make a lot more sense to list DWDM, circuit troubleshooting, and Amazon EC2 than to spend too much time on skills that require you to build a network infrastructure from the ground up.

3. What are the best tips for making a good network engineer resume?

First, be specific about the skills you have. List skills not just in the skills section, but mention how you used those skills when writing your job description bullet points. Secondly, quantify the impact of your work. When you put those two tips together, a bullet point on your network engineer resume might read, “Maintained AWS Direct Connect and VPC to improve bandwidth and reduce network costs for clients by 17% on average.”