As an INTP, career satisfaction means doing work that:
1. Lets you develop, analyze, and critique new ideas.
2. Lets you focus your attention and energy on a creative, theoretical, and logical process, rather than on an end product.
3. Is challenging and deals with complex problems, where you can try unconventional approaches, and take risks to find the best solution.
4. Let you work independently with plenty of quiet, private time to concentrate and complete your thinking process.
5. Let you set and maintain high standards for your work and determine how your performance will be evaluated and compensated.
6. Is done in a flexible, nonstructural environment, without useless rules, excessive limitations, or unnecessary meetings.
7. Lets you interact with a small group of highly regarded friends and associates, all of whom you respect.
8. Gives you opportunities to constantly increase your competence and power and lets you meet and interact with other powerful and successful people.
9. Lets you develop ingenious ideas and plans and lets you delegate the implementation and follow-through to an efficient support staff.
10. Does not require you to spend time directly organizing other people or supervising or mediating interpersonal differences.
Work-Related Strengths and Weaknesses of INTPs include:
Strengths
1. Able to analyze problems with great insight.
2. Architects of creative ideas and systems.
3. Enjoy situations where they have opportunities to learn and master new skills and knowledge.
4. Able to work alone, and concentrate well.
5. Good at long-range thinking.
Weaknesses
1. May be unrealistic about the application of ideas.
2. Ideas may be too complex for others to understand.
3. May lose interest and not apply themselves to follow through.
4. Have little tolerance for redundancy or detailed work.
5. Maybe insensitive to the feelings of others, critical, and demanding.
Pathways To Success In The Job Search Process
As an INTP, your most effective strategies will build on your abilities to:
· See possibilities that don’t exist at present. Look past what is known or represented to you as “the way things are.” Use your imagination to generate possibilities that may arise within the near future and plan how you can best capitalize on them. Consider less obvious means of getting an interviewer’s attention or setting yourself apart from other candidates.
· Create your job opportunities or an adaptation of existing but less attractive opportunities. Using your talents to anticipate future needs, develop a job description for a position that will solve current or future problems. Determine ways of altering and improving an existing opportunity into one that will use your strengths and still serve the needs of the employer.
· Anticipate the logical consequences of actions. Demonstrate your clear sense of cause and effect by offering examples of past experiences where you were called upon to contribute the skill and recount what the positive outcomes were. Use your critical thinking skills when considering any job offer to anticipate both the positive and potentially negative outcomes of any decision.
· Create and implement an innovative job search. View problems that arise as challenges to be met and use your creativity to come up with ways of overcoming them. Set yourself apart from your competition by marketing yourself as a creative, alternative thinker, and let all your materials and correspondence reflect that.
· Keep all your career options open to gather all relevant and important information. Stay cool and detached; never be pressured into making a decision that you haven’t had adequate time to reflect on. Ask lots of questions during all interviews to be sure you have an accurate picture of the job, its responsibilities, and limitations before deciding whether to consider it further.
Possible Pitfalls
· Make sure to eventually move your plans out of the conceptual stage and into practice. Once you have developed an innovative job search plan, ask yourself how realistic some of your ideas are. Is there time to get all you’ve imagined done? Is it possible to create what you have dreamed up? Decide on and hold yourself to a timetable to implement your ideas. Develop a step-by-step plan that includes all the facts (timetable, questions to ask, reminder to send follow-up notes, etc.) so you will be more likely to attend to them.
· Establish realistic objectives and goals based upon what is practical, not on what your confidence tells you is possible. Remember that, depending upon your level of experience and the field you are pursuing, a full career search can take from three to twelve months before you find the right job. Knowing that from the start and reminding yourself of it throughout the process will help keep you from becoming discouraged and disinterested. Ask for support from a close friend when you find your impatience mounting and/or confidence waning.
· Make sure you don’t appear condescending or arrogant to potential employers. Pay close attention to how others perceive you. Ask someone you trust to role-play with you and give you an honest appraisal of your perceived attitude. In an interview, blunt honesty can be perceived as rudeness. Take the time to listen fully to the interviewer’s questions or comments before forming an opinion about him or her. Make it a goal to try to establish rapport early in the interview.
· Remember to follow through on important details involved in the process. Social niceties, such as thank-you notes to people who have conducted informational interviews with you, may seem superfluous, but they are an important part of the process. Stay on top of follow-up calls and letters so you don’t appear disinterested in a position you do want.
· Don’t put off making a decision. After you have spent the necessary time considering your options and clarifying your needs and skills, take action! Discard less attractive options and decide to actively pursue good ones. Don’t wait so long to decide that you inadvertently eliminate an opportunity by procrastinating.
Ken Meyer
Myers Briggs Master Practitioner and Retired Senior Career Coach at Eastern Michigan University
