Best Career Paths For ENFP Personality Types

When you decide which career path to pursue, you’ll likely think through whether or not you can meet the education and skill requirements to get hired in that field, whether or not you live in an area where you can find positions within that career path, and if you’d like the job or not.

This last one is one of the most important factors to consider because if you won’t enjoy a career, there’s no point in paying for a degree or moving to a new area for a job that you’ll hate.

One of the ways you can determine whether or not you’ll like a career path is to look at your Myers-Briggs personality type.

While this personality test doesn’t determine or even describe everything about you, it can be a good tool for helping you identify what types of jobs you might enjoy and which types may drain and frustrate you.

In this article, you’ll learn about the Myers-Briggs ENFP personality type and a list of careers and jobs to consider if you identify as this type.

Top Careers for ENFP Personality Types

Open-minded, creative, and friendly, ENFPs tend to improve any workplace they find themselves in.

For their own happiness, though, workplaces that allow them to test new ideas and be around other people (who are ideally also enthusiastic and full of good ideas) tend to be the best choices for ENFPs.

As with any personality type, every individual ENFP is different, so there is no guarantee that every person who tests this way will be happy in the same career as other ENFPs or that they won’t be happy in other positions. But, to help you get an idea of the types of roles that are likely a good match for your personality, here are some of the career paths most popular with ENFPs:

Human Resource Specialist

Average Yearly Salary: $52,000

As an HR specialist, you get to work with people and solve problems all day, making it an ideal position for an ENFP. Depending on the company, this position might also come with opportunities to implement some of your great ideas.

Plus, you get to spend your time making work a better place for all of your coworkers and get to know them while you do it.

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Real Estate Agent

Average Yearly Salary: $99,000

Real estate agents spend a lot of time meeting with clients to help them sell or buy their homes. This requires some natural charisma and the ability to develop strategies and find creative solutions, making it perfect for an ENFP type.

You can also work for an agency or open up shop for yourself, giving you even more career options and flexibility.

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Insurance Agent

Average Yearly Salary: $49,000

Being an insurance agent is more than just selling insurance policies; It’s being on call to help your clients with their claims and policies whenever they need your help. In this role, you’ll often be helping clients solve some of their biggest, most stressful problems, whether that’s finding the right policy or helping them file a claim after an accident.

You’ll likely have to sell some insurance, too, though, which is also generally right up an ENFP’s alley.

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Travel Agent

Average Yearly Salary: $34,000

Believe it or not, even with the internet, there is still a need for travel agents in the world.

Travel agents do everything from creating Disney World packages and itineraries for families to help them get on every ride they want to or booking entire trips. ENFPs can shine in this role as they get to build relationships with their clients and create the best trips possible for them.

Travel agents typically work independently or for companies like Hopper, AvantStay, or even Marriott Vacations Worldwide.

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Training Specialist

Average Yearly Salary: $56,000

As charismatic individuals who naturally attract and inspire a slew of followers, ENFPs make great training or development specialists. In this role, ENFPs use their natural enthusiasm, love for people, and creativity and imaginativeness to help individuals, teams, and companies grow and improve.

If you decide to pursue this career path, you can find positions where you travel to or host various organizations and teams, or you can work for one company and focus on training all of its employees.

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Producer or Director

Average Yearly Salary: $69,000

Movie producers and directors need to be creative, passionate, and great communicators, making ENFPs perfect for the role. Producers and directors are always coming up with new ideas and working with other like-minded people to make their visions a reality.

If this type of job floats your boat, don’t put too much pressure on yourself to make it big in Hollywood or New York, though. Many companies look for directors and producers to work on ads, training videos, and even news stories.

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Cosmetologist

Average Yearly Salary: $31,000

This creative role requires technical knowledge, an innovative spirit, and enthusiasm for working with people. ENFPs are perfect for this role, as they tend to be strong in all three of these areas.

This is also a great career path if you want to work closely with people and help them become their best selves.

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Fitness Trainer

Average Yearly Salary: $41,000

ENFPs’ ability to motivate and inspire is an ideal quality to have in a fitness trainer. Not only this, but ENFPs in this role will get to know their clients, learn about their needs and goals, and develop ideas on how to help them reach those goals.

This is a great career for ENFPs who like to bring fun to whatever they do, as chances are your clients will need your infectious enthusiasm to keep them going.

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Animal Trainer

Average Yearly Salary: N/A

If you’re an ENFP and you love animals, being an animal trainer might be a great career option for you. Not only do you get to use your natural charisma in an environment where you also get to be around animals, but you also get to use it to improve people’s lives and their relationships with their pets.

A position as an animal trainer can also be a great setting for you to implement your great ideas and allow your creativity to blossom as you learn more about your trade.
Child Care Worker

Average Yearly Salary: $24,000

It’s no secret that it takes a special person to be able to command the attention of a room full of children, and ENFPs are often the people who can do this naturally.

Working in child care can be fulfilling to ENFPs because they can interact with people and use their gifts of positivity, enthusiasm, creativity, and festivity to do their jobs. This is especially true if you end up running your own classroom or child care center.

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Psychologist

Average Yearly Salary: $72,000

If you’re interested in the sciences, a career as a psychologist might be a good option for you. ENFPs are typically very curious and get fired up when they pursue that curiosity creatively, so studying the human mind could be a great outlet for that.

As a psychologist, you can do research, see and treat patients, or some combination of both. Plus, you get to spend a lot of time in school learning about a host of subjects.

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Urban Planner

Average Yearly Salary: $57,000

Imagine getting to plan out how to use and improve land and resources to create the town you’ve always wanted to live in. As an ENFP, your propensity to dream big, your enthusiasm, creativity, and curiosity about several topics and expertise could make working as an urban planner incredibly fulfilling.

In this role, you’d help expand and revitalize your city or community so that it can effectively serve its residents and accommodate new ones. But, if you want to aim even bigger, counties, and metropolitan areas need regional planners.

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Public Relations Manager

Average Yearly Salary: $88,000

The fast-paced world of public relations requires great strategy, people skills, and energy, all of which ENFPs typically have.

Public relations managers do everything from writing press releases and posting pictures on social media to creating publicity campaigns that involve reporters, photographers, and TV appearances.

The fun part about this role is that it’s all but guaranteed that much of your job includes making connections and building relationships with people. Plus, you can work for organizations in basically any field, so you can choose to switch it up and move to a company that operates in a field you’re more interested in.

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Interior Designer

Average Yearly Salary: $54,000

Restaurants, hotels, office buildings, real estate agencies, and homeowners need interior designers to help them create functional and aesthetically pleasing spaces.

ENFPs often make great interior designers because of their creativity, their ability to get to know people and what they really want and need, and their ability to imagine all kinds of possibilities. If the arts or a creative occupation appeals to you, you might consider looking into a career in interior design.

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Chiropractor

Average Yearly Salary: $49,000

If you’re interested in science and healthcare, being a chiropractor might be an enjoyable occupation for you. ENFPs are often fulfilled professionally as chiropractors because there is always something new to learn, and they get to connect with and help people all day.

This is also a great field to get into if you want a more traditional schedule than other doctors and nurses have. Plus, there are a variety of areas you can specialize in or focus on, keeping your options for satiating your curiosity wide open.

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Nutritionist

Average Yearly Salary: $49,000

Nutritionists can work in a variety of roles. These include making meal plans for athletes, helping people lose weight and get in shape, and even treating physical and mental illnesses with food.

You’ll need some more advanced degrees to do the latter, of course, but the opportunities to help people in this way are nearly endless. An ENFP would likely thrive in this role because they’d get to connect with and help people, implement new ideas, and come up with creative solutions for their clients.

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What Does ENFP Mean?

The ENFP, nicknamed the Campaigner, is one of the 16 personality types assigned by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The MBTI is a self-report questionnaire designed to help people gain insight into their unique psychological preferences that impact how they make decisions, perceive the world, and interact with others.

The letters in the ENFP personality type stand for:

Extraverted
Intuitive
Feeling
Prospecting

People who test as the ENFP type tend to be vibrant, upbeat, enthusiastic individuals with big ideas and dreams and love to be around others. They also usually have undying curiosity, which leads to being interested in various occupations, projects, and fields.

Often seen as social butterflies, ENFPs also have deep, introspective moments that lead to creativity and imaginative inspiration. They tend to draw people and their ideas, but they’re usually best at casting the vision and getting the ball rolling as enthusiastic dreamers. In contrast, others help them walk out the long-term, practical steps to get there.

Because they’re interested in so many things, ENFPs can also find it difficult to decide which career path is best for them. Once they decide on a path, though, they’ll typically be able to enjoy nearly any type of job.

However, ENFPs tend to thrive in work environments with a lot of variety and interpersonal connection and in fields that help people or build communities.

Other adjectives used to describe ENFPs include:

Curious
Perceptive
Enthusiastic
Excellent Communicators
Festive
Good-Natured

Careers That ENFPs May Want to Avoid

ENFPs, like any other personality type, can be successful and even thrive in any career path they choose, but there are a few that are more likely to be stressful and draining for ENFPs than they would be for other types.

Here are a few of them:

Bank Teller

Bank tellers’ jobs are typically very systematic. While you’ll have a few customers here and there who have unique problems, most people you’ll work with will have basic requests that require a standardized response or set of actions.

This doesn’t give ENFPs many opportunities to put their vivacious imaginations to work, which could result in boredom or even burnout.
Engineer

Engineers come in all shapes and sizes, and while some ENFPs may find this line of work very fulfilling, much of the responsibilities that come with these roles are highly methodical.

While there is some element of big-picture dreaming in engineering, much of it is the grind of testing, experimenting, or doing equations ─ tasks that often drain ENFPs in the long term.
Chemist

Chemistry is a discipline that requires exactness and a willingness to do repetitive, often uninteresting tasks. While ENFPs are capable of this and the tasks are often working toward a more exciting goal, most people of this personality type won’t find the day-to-day life of this job fulfilling.
Surgeon

ENFPs generally find the most professional fulfillment in roles that bring some variety and require adaptability and creativity. Surgeons’ jobs do not fit that description.

There is almost always only one way to do something in this role, and there is typically very little interaction with patients, which means that of all the medical professions, this is likely to be the most stressful and unfulfilling ones for ENFPs.
Certified Public Accountant

CPAs’ jobs are to follow an established set of procedures and rules. While ENFPs are perfectly capable of doing this, they typically prefer jobs that allow them to stretch themselves and the boundaries of what’s been done before.

This usually isn’t possible in accounting, so this might not be the best career path choice for you if you’re an ENFP.
Software Developer

Developing software does allow you to satiate your curiosity and try new things more than some of the other careers on this list, but it still involves a lot of tedious work. After all, code either works or it doesn’t, so you have to pay close attention to detail and the rules to get it to run properly.

Again, while ENFPs are capable of this, most won’t find this work enjoyable or fulfilling.

ENFP Careers FAQs

Are ENFPs hard workers?

Yes, ENFPs are hard workers. However, as outgoing, lively individuals with big dreams, they can also get caught up in their long-term visions and lose sight of the practical, daily tasks that need to be accomplished.

People with this personality type also crave variety and excitement, so jobs requiring workers to do the same task repeatedly tend to bore and burn out ENFPs.

Employees who are burnt out and bored won’t typically do their jobs well. As such, some managers may see ENFPs as not hard workers. In reality, however, they’re just disappointed and uninterested.

On the other hand, when ENFPs are doing a job they’re excited about, they’re highly driven and have an incredibly high work ethic. Add to this their strong communication skills, natural curiosity, and willingness to take risks, and they’re unstoppable.
Who does an ENFP work well with?

An ENFP works well with people who share their enthusiasm and allow them to work without micromanagement. ENFPs are highly creative, so they usually thrive when they have the freedom to explore ideas and solutions on their own, and they get burnt out when they’re always being told what to do and how to do it.

ENFPs typically enjoy being around people who will catch onto their vision with the same enthusiasm instead of bringing it down. However, as visionaries and dreamers, ENFPs also need people to align their ideas with reality, helping them see and complete the concrete steps required to reach them.

ENFPs also often need accountability to finish a project, as they can easily get so caught up in generating new ideas that they forget to finish what they’re already working on. As a result, ENFPs work well with detail-oriented people who want to work alongside ENFPs instead of telling them what to do or shutting down their ideas.
Should you hire an ENFP?

Yes, you should hire an ENFP. ENFPs bring enthusiasm, passion, creativity, and relationship to their workplaces, all of which are invaluable to a professional team.

ENFPs are also excellent communicators who easily form friendships and garner followers to pursue their dreams and goals. People with this personality type also tend to be highly creative and curious, which means they’re great at coming up with ideas and solutions that may not be obvious to others.

In addition, ENFPs bring enthusiasm and good-naturedness to everything they do and are interested in a wide variety of topics, which makes them enjoyable employees to have. Combine that with their propensity to be leaders wherever they are, and you have some excellent culture-setters on your hands.

If you hire an ENFP, just make sure you give them enough variety and leeway to put all of their strengths to use: Micromanaged ENFPs who are stuck doing the same job repeatedly are often stressed and burnt out in their work environments.
What are ENFPs’ weaknesses?

ENFPs’ weaknesses include a tendency to be overly accommodating, overly optimistic, and unfocused or restless. Every personality trait has a strength and a weakness, and these are the weaknesses that naturally come with ENFPS’ love of building relationships, natural enthusiasm, and ability to dream big.

ENFPs naturally want to be liked, have peaceful relationships with those around them, and encourage everyone, so they can easily fall into the trap of saying yes too easily or becoming people-pleasers. While their willingness to help others and desire for positive relationships is a strength, too much of either of those will wear an ENFP out.

Similarly, ENFPs’ natural enthusiasm and optimism are valuable personality traits to have, but ENFPs can’t allow them to go too far. If this happens, ENFPs can easily fall into a situation where they trust someone too easily or don’t receive or deliver the tough truth when they need to.

Allowing their enthusiasm and optimism to go too far can also cause ENFPs to easily lose track of the more mundane details of life or lose focus on what they’re doing instead of constantly pursuing new and more exciting goals.

Thankfully, many ENFPs learn how to surround themselves with and welcome the input of people who will help them avoid these pitfalls, and they work to become aware of and overcome these weaknesses.

Never miss an opportunity that’s right for you.

Author

Abby McCain

Abby is a writer who is passionate about the power of story. Whether it’s communicating complicated topics in a clear way or helping readers connect with another person or place from the comfort of their couch. Abby attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she earned a degree in writing with concentrations in journalism and business.

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