You know routing and switching cold. You can troubleshoot a BGP session in your sleep. And your salary still hasn’t moved much in the last two years. That’s not bad luck. That’s the market telling you something specific: routing and switching alone doesn’t command a premium anymore. It’s table stakes.
This article ranks the skills and certs that actually move an Indian network engineer’s salary in 2026, roughly by how much, and what each one costs you in time and money to acquire. No batch to sell here, just the honest math.
Why Routing and Switching Alone Is Plateauing
Here’s the blunt version. Every network engineer knows OSPF, VLANs, and basic troubleshooting. That used to be enough to stand out. Now it’s the entry price. As networks moved to the cloud, as SD-WAN replaced MPLS, and as security folded into every network conversation, the premium moved away from pure CLI skill and toward three specific areas: automation, cloud networking, and security.
This doesn’t mean your core skills are worthless. They’re the foundation everything else sits on. But if you’ve been doing the same CCNA-level work for four or five years and wondering why your pay stalled, this is why. The market stopped paying extra for what everyone already has.
If your fundamentals feel rusty before you tackle any of the levers below, refresh them for free with Scaler’s Computer Networks course. It costs you nothing and closes the gap fast.
The Salary-Lever Table: What Actually Moves Pay
Here’s the whole article in one table. Everything below expands on this.
| Skill / Cert | Typical pay impact | Time to acquire | Verdict |
| Network automation (Python + Ansible + Netmiko) | Roughly 40-70% premium over CLI-only engineers | 3-6 months of focused practice | The single biggest lever available right now |
| Cloud networking (AWS VPC, Azure VNet, hybrid design) | Roughly 35-60% premium | 3-6 months | The enterprise crossover skill, especially at mid-to-senior level |
| CCNP (Enterprise, Security, or Service Provider) | Roughly 35-60% over CCNA-only profiles | 6-12 months of study | Worth it after 2-3 years of experience, almost always |
| Security crossover (firewalls, segmentation, zero-trust) | Meaningful premium in regulated industries, harder to pin to one number | 3-6 months for working fluency | Strong in banking, healthcare, and government-adjacent work |
| SD-WAN (Viptela, VeloCloud, Fortinet) | Roughly 30-50% premium | 2-4 months on top of core skills | Rising fast as MPLS gets replaced |
| CCIE (any track) | Roughly ₹18-40 LPA ceiling, niche apex | 1-2+ years, high cost | Worth it for ISPs, data centres, and vendor-facing roles. Overkill for most enterprise engineers |
| Deep BGP mastery alone, without automation or cloud | Real premium only at ISPs, data centres, and cloud providers | Ongoing, protocol-specific depth | Valuable, but narrower than it used to be |
Notice the pattern. The three biggest levers, automation, cloud, and CCNP, aren’t mutually exclusive. Stack any two of them, and you’re in a different salary bracket than someone who only has the third.
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Lever 1: The Automation Multiplier (Python + Ansible)
This is the biggest lever on the table, and it’s also the one most CLI-only engineers avoid because it feels like “a developer’s job.” It isn’t. It’s increasingly your job.
Here’s what changed. Networks used to be configured one device at a time, by hand, over SSH. That doesn’t scale past a certain size, and it definitely doesn’t survive a fast-moving cloud migration. So networking split into two camps: engineers who still configure devices manually, and engineers who write code that configures hundreds of devices consistently and reversibly. The second group is called NetDevOps, and they get paid meaningfully more.
What to actually learn, in order:
- Basic Python. Loops, functions, working with files and dictionaries. You don’t need to be a software engineer. You need to be comfortable enough to read and modify scripts without fear.
- Netmiko or NAPALM. These libraries let Python talk to network devices over SSH and pull or push configuration. This is where automation stops being abstract and starts touching real routers and switches.
- Ansible. This is where the real leverage shows up. Ansible playbooks let you define network state as code and push it consistently across your entire fleet, with version control and rollback built in.
- Basic Linux fluency. Automation tooling runs on Linux, and if you’re shaky on the command line, that gap will slow you down at every step. If networking commands in Linux feel unfamiliar, close that gap before you go further.
Start small and concrete. Pick one repetitive task you currently do by hand, like pulling running-configs from 30 switches to check for a specific setting, and write a script that does it in under a minute instead of an afternoon. That single script is a real, quotable NetDevOps credential the moment it works.
Lever 2: Cloud Networking (VPC and VNet Design)
If your organisation has any presence in AWS, Azure, or GCP, and almost every mid-to-large Indian company does now, cloud networking is the crossover skill that makes you valuable beyond the on-premise data centre.
What this actually covers:
- VPC and VNet design. Subnetting, route tables, peering, and transit gateways inside AWS or Azure.
- Hybrid connectivity. Site-to-site VPNs, ExpressRoute, and Direct Connect that link your on-premises network to the cloud without breaking security policy.
- Cloud load balancing and traffic management. Understanding how traffic actually moves once it leaves your physical network.
- Multi-cloud awareness. Increasingly, large Indian enterprises run workloads across more than one cloud provider, and someone has to make the networking between them coherent.
This is exactly where classic networking and DevOps culture overlap, so devops networking concepts are worth studying directly alongside cloud-specific material. The engineers who bridge on-premises and cloud networking are rare enough right now that the premium reflects genuine scarcity, not hype.
Start by rebuilding a small piece of your current network’s connectivity model inside a free-tier AWS or Azure account. Design the VPC, set up the routing, and document why you made each decision. That artefact alone puts you ahead of most CCNP-only candidates in an interview.
Lever 3: Security Crossover
Security used to be a separate team. It isn’t anymore, not fully. Firewalls, segmentation, and access control increasingly sit inside the network engineer’s job description, especially in regulated industries like banking, healthcare, insurance, and anything government-adjacent.
What matters here:
- Firewall configuration and policy design, not just knowing a vendor’s product exists.
- Network segmentation, including VLANs used for genuine security boundaries rather than just traffic separation.
- Zero-trust awareness. You don’t need to be a security architect, but you need to understand why “trust nothing by default” is replacing perimeter-based security models, and what that means for how you design a network.
- Basic log analysis and incident response, since network engineers are often the first people to notice something is wrong.
Cybersecurity and networking overlap more every year, and reading up on that overlap directly will save you time versus treating security as a separate discipline you’ll get to eventually.
This lever varies by industry. In banking and healthcare, it’s close to mandatory for senior roles. In a smaller product company, it might be a nice-to-have. Choose this fork based on where you actually work or want to work, not because it sounds impressive on paper.
Advanced Protocol Depth: When BGP Mastery Still Pays
Here’s an honest caveat to the automation-and-cloud narrative. Deep protocol expertise hasn’t disappeared as a salary lever. It’s just gotten narrower.
If you work at an ISP, a large data centre operator, or a cloud provider building its own backbone, genuinely deep BGP knowledge, route reflectors, route policy, and multi-homing still command a real premium. These environments run at a scale and complexity where automation and cloud skills alone don’t substitute for someone who deeply understands how routes actually propagate and fail.
If you want to go deep here, BGP is the place to start, since it underpins almost everything else in large-scale routing.
But be honest with yourself about where you work. If you’re at a mid-size enterprise managing a few hundred devices, pure protocol depth without automation or cloud skills layered on top will plateau faster than it used to. This lever pays best when it’s combined with scale, not in isolation.
The Cert Economics: CCNP, CCIE, and Specializations
This is the section cert-sellers won’t give you straight, because the honest math doesn’t always favour the most expensive option.
CCNP: the realistic math
A CCNP requires two exams: a core exam and a concentration exam of your choice (Enterprise, Security, Service Provider, and others). Combined, the exam fees run around $700, and once you add study materials, practice labs, and possibly training, the realistic total lands somewhere between $800 and $2,500. Most candidates spend six to twelve months preparing, depending on how much of the material they already know from real work.
What you get back: CCNP holders in India typically earn somewhere around 35 to 60% more than CCNA-only engineers with comparable experience, based on current CTC data across AmbitionBox, Naukri, and industry salary guides. That’s a genuinely strong return, and it’s why CCNP is the certification most senior engineers should hold by the time they’re three or four years in.
The catch: CCNP alone, without automation or cloud skills layered on, is starting to plateau the same way routing and switching did. Pair it with Lever 1 or Lever 2, and the combination compounds rather than just stacking.
CCIE: the niche apex
CCIE is a different animal entirely. It requires a written qualifying exam (around $400) and then an eight-hour practical lab exam (around $1,600), and you’ll need to travel to one of a small number of test centres worldwide to sit it. Because most candidates need multiple lab attempts to pass, the realistic all-in cost, including training and lab practice, typically ranges from $12,000 to $20,000.
CCIE holders in India are genuinely rare, with well under 2,000 active holders across the country, and they can command roughly ₹18-40 LPA depending on specialisation and industry. CCIE Security and CCIE Data Center tend to sit at the top of that range.
The honest verdict: CCIE makes sense if you’re targeting ISP, data centre, or vendor-facing roles where that depth of expertise is genuinely load-bearing. For most enterprise network engineers, the return on a CCIE doesn’t clearly beat the return on pairing a CCNP with strong automation or cloud skills, at a fraction of the cost and time. Don’t chase CCIE because it sounds prestigious. Chase it because your actual career target requires it.
Specialization certs vs. generic stacking
A common mistake is stacking multiple broad, generic certifications instead of going deep on one specialization that matches real demand. A cloud networking certification from AWS or Azure, layered on top of a CCNP, usually beats a second unrelated Cisco cert for salary impact, simply because it proves you can do the crossover work employers are actually hiring for.
Verify current exam pricing directly on Cisco’s certification pages before you commit budget, since fees and exam structures do get revised.
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Your 12-Month Upskilling Plan and Career Forks
You don’t need to chase every lever at once. Pick a fork based on where your interest and your organisation’s direction actually point.
Months 1-3: shore up fundamentals and pick your fork. If your core routing, switching, and troubleshooting skills have any gaps, close them now using free resources. Decide which of the three forks below fits your situation best.
Months 4-8: go deep on one lever. Don’t split your attention across automation, cloud, and security simultaneously. Pick one and build something real: a working automation script suite, a documented cloud network design, or a segmented, policy-driven lab network.
Months 9-12: layer a certification on top of what you built. If you went the automation route, CCNP plus a DevNet-adjacent credential makes sense. If you went cloud, pair CCNP with an AWS or Azure networking certification. If you went security, CCNP Security is the natural next step.
The three forks
- NetDevOps fork. Python, Ansible, CI for network changes, infrastructure as code applied to networking. Highest growth path, and it leads naturally into platform engineering roles.
- Cloud network architect fork. VPC and VNet design, hybrid connectivity, multi-cloud networking. Best fit if your company is actively migrating infrastructure to the cloud.
- Security specialist fork. Firewalls, segmentation, zero-trust design, regulated-industry compliance. Best fit if you’re in banking, healthcare, or any environment where security isn’t optional.
Whichever fork you pick, use current Glassdoor India data as a sanity check on your target salary band before you negotiate, and pull fresh numbers since bands shift year to year.
Once you have solid data on typical bands, compare your current package honestly and figure out which lever closes the biggest gap fastest. For most CLI-only engineers, that’s automation.
The automation fork in particular leads straight into platform engineering. If that’s the direction you want, Scaler’s DevOps Program covers the infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD skills that sit right next to network automation, and it’s worth exploring once you’ve validated the fork is right for you.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Which skills increase a network engineer’s salary most?
Automation with Python and Ansible is the biggest lever in 2026, followed by cloud networking (VPC and VNet design) and security crossover. All three command real premiums over routing-and-switching-only profiles.
Is CCNP worth it for salary growth?
Usually yes, especially after two to three years of experience. Pair it with automation or cloud skills rather than treating it as a standalone credential, since CCNP alone is starting to plateau the way CCNA did before it.
Do network engineers need to learn Python?
Increasingly, yes. Network automation is the clearest line separating plateaued CLI engineers from premium NetDevOps roles. Ansible plus a working knowledge of basic Python covers most real-world demand.
What is NetDevOps?
It’s the application of DevOps practices to networking: infrastructure as code, automated configuration management, and CI pipelines for network changes. It’s currently the highest-growth specialization in networking.
Should I specialize in cloud networking or security?
Both pay well. Choose based on where you actually work. Enterprises migrating to the cloud favour VPC and hybrid connectivity skills, while regulated industries like banking and healthcare reward the security crossover more heavily.
Is CCIE still worth pursuing?
As a niche apex certification, yes, particularly for ISP, data centre, or vendor-facing tracks. For most enterprise network engineers, pairing automation skills with a specialization delivers a better return per hour and rupee invested than chasing CCIE.
Where This Leaves You
Routing and switching got you in the door. It won’t get you the next raise on its own anymore. The market is paying extra for three specific things: engineers who can automate instead of click through a CLI, engineers who can design networks that span on-premise and cloud, and engineers who understand security well enough to own it rather than hand it off.
Pick one, spend the next few months building something real in it, and layer the right certification on top once you have practical proof to back it up. That combination, not another generic cert, is what actually moves your number.
