Network Engineer
Network engineers design, build and maintain the networks that carry an organisation's data, and they are the people called when a connection drops or slows down.
- Median salary
- $120,100
4.1%vs last year, before tax
- People employed
- 14,500
2.1%vs last year
- Projected growth
- +25.2%
to 2035
- AI exposure*
- Moderate
- automation risk
- Average hours
- 41/wk
+1h vs all jobs
- Shortage status
- Not in shortage
national
Network engineers plan, configure and troubleshoot the routers, switches, firewalls and links that make up an organisation's local and wide area networks, increasingly extending that work into cloud infrastructure. The role is easily confused with a systems administrator's, but a network engineer focuses on how traffic moves and stays secure between systems rather than on the servers and software running on them. Most work sits inside an IT team, a bank or telecommunications company, or a managed services provider, and vendor certifications from Cisco, AWS or Palo Alto carry real weight alongside the qualification.
How much do network engineers earn?
The median full-time salary for a network engineer is $120,100 per annum, before tax, up $25,100 since 2018.
Pay moves with the sector and the employer: banks, telecommunications companies and large managed services providers generally sit above the middle, while internal IT teams in smaller organisations often sit below it. On-call allowances, penalty rates for after-hours maintenance work and contract day rates all add to the base figure, so a permanent salary and a contractor's rate are not directly comparable. Holding a current certification such as CCNP, or a cloud networking specialisation, can shift an offer more than another year of general experience.
What does a network engineer do day to day?
The list below is what fills most weeks; the exact mix shifts with seniority and whatever stage the current work is at.
- Monitoring dashboards and alerts to catch a failing link before users notice
- Tracing intermittent drop-outs and slow performance back to a specific device or route
- Configuring and patching routers, switches and firewalls without disrupting live traffic
- Documenting changes and keeping network diagrams current so the next incident is faster to fix
- Planning upgrades and cutovers for maintenance windows agreed with the business
What skills do network engineers need?
Employers look for networks and systems administration, cyber security, cloud infrastructure, backed by Cisco IOS fluency and strong problem solving.
Specialist skills
- Networks and systems administration
- Cyber security
- Cloud infrastructure
- Project management
- Regulatory compliance
- Data analysis
Software and tools
- Cisco IOS
- Wireshark
- AWS VPC
- Palo Alto Networks
- Juniper Junos
General skills
- Problem solving
- Written communication
Is the job growing?
About 14,500 people work as network engineers in Australia, and employment is projected to grow 25.2% over the decade to 2035. That's very strong growth. Few roles in Australia are expanding this fast, and it points to solid demand for years to come.
How do you become a network engineer?
Here's the path most network engineers take, step by step.
- 1Start with a qualification in IT or networking
A Certificate IV or diploma in information technology with a networking focus at TAFE, or a bachelor degree in IT or computer science, covers the fundamentals of addressing, routing and switching that everything else builds on.
- 2Add a vendor certification and lab practice
Employers read certifications as proof you can configure real equipment, and the entry-level Cisco Certified Network Associate is the common starting point. Packet Tracer, GNS3 and home lab gear let you practise configurations before you touch a production network.
- 3Get a first job close to the network
Many engineers start on a service desk or in IT support, where you learn how a business uses its systems and how to work through a fault with someone waiting. Move into the network team when a role opens, or apply directly to managed services providers, which hire at junior level and expose you to many different networks.
- 4Specialise as you go
Professional-level certifications, cloud networking credentials and security training are what move you from maintaining a network to designing one. Larger employers often fund this study, and it is usually worth asking about before you accept an offer.
Ready to apply as a network engineer?
Whether you're working toward becoming a network engineer or already are one and want a hand with the next step (sharpening your resume for ATS screening, tightening your cover letter, or knowing what you'll actually be asked at interview), here are examples grounded in this specific role, not generic templates.
What jobs can a network engineer move to?
Moving into DevOps Engineer typically comes with the biggest pay rise, worth $11,800 a year more on average.
| Move to | Typical pay change | Overlap | Retraining |
|---|---|---|---|
| DevOps Engineer Applies network automation and infrastructure skills to continuous delivery pipelines, though substantial retraining in development tooling is required.Known move | +$11,800 | 31% | reskill |
| Cyber Security Analyst Uses network traffic analysis and security fundamentals to specialise in threat detection, needing further study in security operations.Known move | +$7,900 | 44% | reskill |
| Systems Administrator Brings network and infrastructure knowledge to broader server and operating system administration, needing only a short course.Known move | +$7,900 | 48% | short course |
| Network Architect A natural senior step designing end-to-end network architectures, drawing on deep routing and switching expertise with focused study. | +$4,700 | 52% | short course |
| Site Reliability Engineer A close fit for keeping large-scale services reliable, applying network and systems troubleshooting with little extra training. | +$2,100 | 62% | minimal |
Moves are chosen from Jobs and Skills Australia's Data on Occupation Mobility, which follows income tax records between 2011-12 and 2020-21, together with entry requirements and skill overlap. A known move is one people were seen making in that data. Pay change compares median full-time pay for the two roles.
Who works as a network engineer?
The typical network engineer is 40 years old; 92% are men, 93% work full-time, and full-timers average 41 hours a week.
- 40
- Median age
- 8%
- Female share
- 93%
- Full-time
- +1h
- vs all-jobs avg
What's it like being a network engineer?
Network engineers look after infrastructure that has to stay up, so the week runs on a rhythm of monitoring, planned change and unplanned fault. Much of the skill is diagnostic: narrowing a vague complaint about slowness down to one device, one route or one misconfiguration, often while somebody waits for an answer. The people who enjoy it tend to like systems thinking and problems with a definite cause, and they accept that the quiet weeks are when the documentation gets written.
What people like
- Faults that only make sense at packet level. An application that looks healthy at every layer can turn out to be a routing asymmetry or a duplex mismatch, and tracking that down is the part of the job engineers tend to enjoy most.
- The network disappears when it works. Success means nobody notices the network at all, so the reward is a quiet dashboard rather than praise, which suits people who like their work to hold up under scrutiny.
- A visible ladder of certifications. Vendor certifications mark clear stages from entry level to expert, and each one tends to widen the roles and the salaries you can apply for.
- New technology keeps arriving. Cloud networking, automation and security tooling change what the job involves every few years, so the work rarely settles into one routine for long.
What people find hard
- Maintenance windows and on-call. Changes that could interrupt traffic happen at night or on weekends, and an on-call roster means a 2am call when something fails unexpectedly.
- Change control and process. A single change to a core switch may need a request, a review and a documented rollback plan, which slows things down even when the fix is obvious.
- Being the first call when something breaks. When email or the phones stop, the network team is usually contacted first, whatever the cause eventually turns out to be.
- Documentation debt. Networks grow through years of small changes, so rebuilding an accurate picture of what is actually connected is patient, unglamorous work that never quite finishes.
Based on our synthesis of professional-body surveys and public accounts of the role, not first-person verified reviews.
Which industries employ network engineers?
Professional, Scientific and Technical Services employs the largest share of network engineers, followed by Financial and Insurance Services.
Top employing industries
- 1Professional, Scientific and Technical Services
- 2Financial and Insurance Services
- 3Information Media and Telecommunications
Ranked by employment share; the source doesn't publish an exact percentage per industry.
| Bachelor degree | 40.4% | |
|---|---|---|
| Postgraduate | 21.8% | |
| Diploma / Advanced Diploma | 14.8% | |
| Year 12 or below | 10.5% | |
| Certificate III/IV | 7.4% |
Will AI replace network engineers?
AI and automation have a moderate reach into network engineering: they have taken over much of the routine monitoring and generate a lot of configuration, but they have not taken over decisions about what a network should do. Intent-based networking, software-defined networking and cloud tooling can apply policies automatically, and AIOps platforms group alerts that once arrived as thousands of separate events. What remains is judging whether a change is safe, applying it to live traffic, and diagnosing faults that no tool has seen before.
Share of typical working time by exposure level
- Diagnosing faults across the networkTooling will often point at a suspect device, but an intermittent drop-out still means packet captures in Wireshark and working out why one path behaves differently from the rest.30%moderate
- Configuring routers, switches and firewallsTemplates, Ansible playbooks and infrastructure-as-code generate standard configurations, and the engineer reviews, tests and applies them rather than typing them line by line.25%high
- Planning upgrades and negotiating maintenance windowsSequencing a change across sites, agreeing an outage window with the business and having a rollback ready depends on how that organisation actually works, not on a model.25%low
- Monitoring dashboards and triaging alertsAIOps platforms now correlate and suppress alerts, so a great deal of what used to be watching graphs is automated, though someone still decides which of the remaining alerts is real.20%high
Common questions about becoming a network engineer
Straight answers to the questions people ask most.
How much do network engineers earn?
The median for full-time network engineers is $120,100 per year before tax. Pay above that depends heavily on sector, on whether you carry an on-call roster, and on the certifications you hold.
How do you become a network engineer?
Most people start with a diploma or degree in IT, add an entry-level vendor certification such as the Cisco CCNA, and then get a first role on a service desk or in a network operations team. From there, professional-level certifications and hands-on responsibility for real equipment do most of the work.
Are network engineers in demand?
Network engineers are currently not in shortage, and employment is projected to grow 25.2% over the decade to 2035. Demand also shifts with the technology: employers increasingly want engineers who can work with cloud networks and automation as well as on-premises equipment.
Will AI replace network engineers?
AI and automation reach the monitoring and configuration parts of this job more than the rest. Dashboards now group and correlate alerts, and templates or infrastructure-as-code tools generate much of a standard configuration, but someone still has to decide what the change should be, apply it without dropping live traffic, and untangle a fault when the tooling points at the wrong device.
What can network engineers move into?
Cyber security analyst is a common move, using the same traffic analysis and firewall knowledge to specialise in threat detection, and it pays $7,900 more. Site reliability engineer draws on similar troubleshooting skills for large-scale services and needs relatively little retraining, paying $2,100 more. Systems administrator is the other direction, and pays $7,900 more.
Can network engineers work for themselves?
Yes. Experienced engineers often move into contracting or set up their own consultancy doing network design, audits and managed support for smaller businesses, and this is frequently where earnings grow. It helps to build a client base and a specialisation first, because the work is sold on your reputation and your certifications.
Related roles
- Network Architect
- Cyber Security Analyst
- DevOps Engineer
- Systems Administrator
- Site Reliability Engineer
- IT Support Officer
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