ISTP

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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• Can offer an objective perspective on matters
• Good at organising facts and applying logical principles
• Excellent at cutting right to the core of a problem and finding practical solutions
• Careful observer
• Interested in the how and why things work
• Often skilled and interested in technical matters
• Good trouble shooter
• Action and results orientated
• Can work quietly and steadily to analyse and solve problems
• Often become the specialist on particular matters
• Usually quietly self confident
• Enjoy using your hands or mastering specialist equipment

Your preferred work environment

• Allows them to master and apply skills and knowledge
• Encourages independent, autonomous working
• Not heavily structured and rule-bound
• Contains people who are practical and can stay focused on the immediate task in hand
• Primarily task and project orientated
• Provides a variety of challenging problems to solve
• Will usually do well working for themselves

Your leadership style

• Lead by the example of just getting on with the job
• Good at responding quickly to deal with challenges
• Take a hands off approach to others in their team
• Expect others to just get on as they do
• Will set clear standards and principles to guide others but will not monitor others closely
• Good crisis manager
• Willing to take risks to get to a solution
• Task managers rather than people managers

Weaknesses you should watch out for

• Resistant to being forced into rigid structures and systems
• May overlook the needs of the people around them
• May be so focused on immediate application of your ideas that you fail to see the bigger picture
• Can get bored and frustrated if you do not have variety and flexibility
• Have little time for abstract theories if you cannot see a practical application
• May lack a strategic overview
• May appear insensitive to colleagues when focusing on the task in hand

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 ISTP 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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