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Careers for ISFJ Personality Types

By Brenda Ellis, PersonalityPage.com

Whether you're a young adult trying to find your place in the world, or a not-so-young adult trying to find out if you're moving along the right path, it's important to understand yourself and the personality traits that will impact your likeliness to succeed or fail at various careers. It's equally important to understand what is really important to you. When armed with an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, and an awareness of what you truly value, you are in an excellent position to pick a career that you will find rewarding.

The following traits are generally found in ISFJs:

  1. Large, rich inner store of information that they have gathered
  2. Highly observant and aware of people's feelings and reactions
  3. Excellent memory for details that are important to them
  4. Very in-tune with their surroundings - excellent sense of space and function
  5. Can be depended on to follow things through to completion
  6. Will work long and hard to see that jobs get done
  7. Stable, practical, down-to-earth
  8. Dislike working with theory and abstract thought
  9. Dislike doing things that don't make sense to them
  10. Value security, tradition, and peaceful living
  11. Service-oriented: focused on what people need and want
  12. Kind and considerate
  13. Likely to put others' needs above their own
  14. Learn best with hands-on training
  15. Enjoy creating structure and order
  16. Take their responsibilities seriously
  17. Extremely uncomfortable with conflict and confrontation

ISFJs have two basic traits that help define their best career direction: 1) they are extremely interested and in-tune with how other people are feeling, and 2) they enjoy creating structure and order, and are extremely good at it. Ideally, the ISFJ will choose a career in which they can use their exceptional people-observation skills to determine what people want or need, and then use their excellent organizational abilities to create a structured plan or environment for achieving what people want. Their excellent sense of space and function combined with their awareness of aesthetic quality also gives them quite special abilities in the more practical artistic endeavors, such as interior decorating and clothes design.

The following list of professions is built on our impression of careers that would be especially suitable for an ISFJ. It is meant to be a starting place, rather than an exhaustive list. There are no guarantees that any or all of the careers listed here would be appropriate for you, or that your best career match is among those listed here.

   
 

Possible Careers Paths for ISFJ

Interior Decorator
Designer
Firefighter
Nurse
Business Manager
Office Manager
Administrative Assistant
Child Care Provider
Social Worker
Counselor
Paralegal
Pastor or Priest
Church Employee
Shopkeeper
Bookkeeper
Forest Ranger