ISTP Careers
This page looks at careers for an average ISTP. However, every ISTP is different, and you are a unique individual. Our career questionnaire helps you confirm whether your type is ISTP, and provides an optional report that matches your unique personality with over 100 potential careers.
ISTP Types
If your closest personality type is ISTP then you have both a logical and a practical mind and therefore enjoy solving tangible problems. You are very interested in how things work, and may have a tendency to take things apart if you don't know how they work. You may also enjoy using your craftmanslike skills to fix things that are broken, or doing investigative work, collecting facts and clues to find out the truth of what has happened.ISTP Career Enjoyment
The table, below right, shows which careers ISTPs say they enjoy doing most - based on research involving over 10,000 people. We asked people to tell us their job and how much they were enjoying it. We also asked them to complete our questionnaire and/or declare their personality type. We found three important lessons from this research:
- Unsurprisingly, ISTPs tend to enjoy certain jobs more than others. This happens when the demands of a job match the preferences of an ISTP
- Some jobs are inherently more enjoyable than others, irrespective of personality type. This is because there are many factors other than personality type that make a job enjoyable, such as the opportunity for achievement or the degree of freedom/autonomy you have in the job.
- Not all ISTPs are the same. There are variations in individual preferences that affect how much each ISTP enjoys each job.
| Career | Average 'Enjoyment' Score (max=6) | n |
|---|---|---|
| Research | 4.2 | (8) |
| The Forces | 4.2 | (4) |
| Marketing | 4.1 | (6) |
| Nursing | 4.0 | (9) |
| Training | 4.0 | (5) |
| Writing | 4.0 | (3) |
| Psychology | 4.0 | (2) |
| (Our Careers Report contains many more) | ||
The scores in the table (right) show how much ISTPs scored each type of career for enjoyment (the maximum score was six). The number in brackets is how many ISTPs were in that career in the survey. This aspect of our research involved 10,631 people, of whom 417 had preferences for ISTP.
The tables sometimes contain some surprising results. This can happen if a job is inherently enjoyable, or if there are low numbers of people doing the job (which means that individual, unique preferences have a greater bearing on the results).
Example Stretch Diagram (Auditor)
| Profile Match |  |
| Job Rating |  |
What people in this job liked about it: teamwork, developing relationships, interacting with clients, being respected as an advisor, learning (e.g.: about different businesses), challenges, travel (to client), investigative work, improving things, non-routine, good money.
What they disliked: stress of work overload, lack of meaning or intellectual challenge, being disliked by some people, being in an office all day, accountancy work, working alone, lack of clear goals, politics.
One way to identify a suitable career is to match your personality preferences with the behavioural demands of potential careers. You are likely to find a career enjoyable if there is a good match, but stressful if there is a poor match.
The diagram (right) compares the average preferences of a ISTP with the demands of working as an auditor. In this diagram, each segment represents a particular style of thinking or behaving that corresponds with each of the sixteen personality types.
This diagram shows not only how much opportunity an ISTP has to use ISTP behaviours in the job, but also how much you are expected to use the behaviours associated with the other types, and whether the overall balance suits your individual preferences:
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A red segment suggests that the career demands more of this type of behaviour than is your preference. |
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A blue segment suggests that you would like to use these types of behaviours more than is needed in this career. |
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A white (or very light green) segment suggests that there is a good match between the demands of the job and your individual preferences. |
This diagram matches an average ISTJ with one job (auditor). Our career test matches your individual, unique preferences with over 100 potential jobs: