ISTJ

Your Type and Your Career

The best employment options for you will allow you to use your natural strengths and limit your exposure to tasks and situations that will drain you.

Here are some suggestions about what is likely to suit you in terms of personal strengths at work, preferred environment and your leadership style. There is also an indication of possible areas of weakness you should watch out for when you are assessing career change ideas.

Your strengths at work

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• Perseverance and concentration
• Thorough and systematic
• Logical, realistic and dependable
• Excellent organisers
• Create structure and order in what you do
• Loyal with a strong sense of duty and responsibility
• Set high standards and expect the same of others
• Good at dispassionately weighing up pros and cons
• Accepting of rules and regulations
• Excellent eye for detail
• Meticulous, methodical and accurate
• See things through to completion
• Favour tradition
• Comfortable working independently without supervision

Your preferred work environment

• Allows for quiet, independent working
• Clearly structured
• Contains others who share their hard working attitude
• Secure and stable
• Organised and orderly
• Task orientated
• May have a technical focus
• Has clear organisational objectives

Your leadership style

• Hands off leader
• Base your style on their experience of what works
• Are steady and reliable
• Traditionalist – will maintain existing structures and systems
• Reward work done in a correct and timely manner
• Focus on the detail of the task in hand rather than take a strategic overview
• Ensure that tasks are completed to deadline

Weaknesses your should watch out for

• Can be resistant to change
• May apply rules and regulations rigidly and be seen as inflexible
• May fail to value new ideas and innovation
• Can be critical and insensitive of others
• Find it hard to delegate
• May fail to see the bigger picture
• Tend to expect others to conform to your standards
• Do not tune in to the needs of others
• Can reject new ideas if you cannot see the immediate practical benefits

These points should help you identify if a job or an area of work is worth considering. But remember that there are successful people of ALL types in ALL jobs. Particular types may find certain areas of work especially satisfying and others more challenging.

Use your understanding of your own ISTJ preferences to help you explore and develop your career ideas, not to limit them.

Not sure if this is you?

Then take a look at the other similar types, where only one of the preferences is different. You may find that they are a more comfortable 'fit'.

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