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Careers for ISTJ 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 ISTJs:

  1. Value tradition, security, and peaceful living
  2. Will work long and hard to fulfill duties
  3. Can be depended on to follow through on tasks
  4. Loyal and faithful
  5. Stable, practical and down-to-earth
  6. Family-minded
  7. Dislike doing things that don't make sense to them
  8. Dislike abstract theory, unless they see the practical application
  9. Natural leaders
  10. Prefer to work alone, but work well in teams when necessary
  11. Extremely observant, they take in facts via their senses and store them internally
  12. Vast, rich inner store of facts that they rely on to understand problems that they encounter in their lives
  13. Profound respect for facts and concrete information
  14. Make decisions objectively, applying logic and rational thinking
  15. Dislike change, unless they are shown it's benefit in a concrete way
  16. Have strong opinions about the way things should be done
  17. Appreciate structured, orderly environments
  18. Have very high standards for their own behavior and the behavior of others
  19. Not naturally in-tune with other people's feelings
  20. Able to accomplish almost anything if they put their minds to it
  21. Community minded "good citizens"

ISTJs have one character trait that puts them at a definite advantage in terms of career success - Perseverence. An ISTJ can do almost anything that they have decided to do. However, there are areas in which they will function more happily and naturally. An ISTJ will do best in a career in which they can use their excellent organizational skills and their powers of concentration to create order and structure. ISTJs seem to fit extremely well into the Management and Executive layer of the corporate business world.

The following list of professions is built on our impression of careers that would be especially suitable for an ISTJ. 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 ISTJ

Business Executive
Administrator
Manager
Accountant
Financial Officer
Police Officer
Detective
Judge
Attorney
Medical Doctor
Dentist
Computer Programmer
Systems Analyst
Military Leader