As per PersonalityPage terms and conditions, you are allowed to print one copy of this material for your personal use.

Careers for ISTP 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 ISTPs:

  1. Interested in how and why things work
  2. Do not function well in regimented, structured environments; they will either feel stifled or become intensely bored
  3. Constantly gather facts about their environment and store them away
  4. Have an excellent ability to apply logic and reason to their immense store of facts to solve problems or discover how things work
  5. Learn best "hands-on"
  6. Usually able to master theory and abstract thinking, but don't particularly like dealing with it unless they see a practical application
  7. Action-oriented "doers"
  8. Focused on living in the present, rather than the future
  9. Love variety and new experiences
  10. Highly practical and realistic
  11. Excellent "trouble-shooters," able to quickly find solutions to a wide variety of practical problems
  12. Results-oriented; they like to see immediate results for their efforts
  13. Usually laid-back and easy-going with people
  14. Risk-takers who thrive on action
  15. Independent and determined - usually dislike committing themselves
  16. Usually quite self-confident

The ISTP is fortunate because they have the ability to be good at many different kinds of tasks. Their introverted and thinking preferences give them the ability to concentrate and work through problems - that leaves many doors open to them. However, to be happiest, the ISTP needs to lead a lifestyle that offers a great deal of autonomy and does not include much external enforcement of structure. ISTPs will do best working for themselves, or working in very flexible environments. Their natural interests lie towards applying their excellent reasoning skills against known facts and data to discover underlying structure, or solutions to practical questions.

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

Police Officer
Detective
Forensic Pathologist
Computer Programmer
Systems Analyst
Engineer
Construction
Mechanic
Farmer
Pilot
Athlete
Entrepreneur