Best Career Paths For ENTP Personality Types

Can your innate personality traits help you find your career path? It’s possible, and we’ve got some tips to help you along the road. The first thing you’ll have to do is figure out what your personality is.

One of the most popular ways to dig into your personality and learn more about what makes you tick is to take a personality test. There are a lot of them out there, and they’re not all the same. One that’s stood the test of time is based on the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung. He theorized that personality is made of cognitive function, and it’s the order of these functions that determine your personality types.

Translating Jung’s theories into a personality test is most famously done by The Myers Briggs Type Indicator® personality inventory. This test will give you a four-letter personality category. Each letter designates a personality trait and its “position” in your character.

Top Careers for ENTP Personality Types

If you’ve decided that the characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of an ENTP really line up with who you are, then you might wonder what careers you’d do best in. Where would you thrive as an ENTP professional? Let’s take a look at what careers are best for ENTP personality types and why.

Finance Analyst

Average Annual Salary: $72,000

A financial analyst stays on top of financial trends and loves learning about what’s happening in the world of finance and the world in general. Their ability to quickly put together how different news events can affect the financial sector makes them incredibly successful in this field.

ENTP people are also very good at convincing people and drawing people to them. This helps them get their ideas across and convince others that what they see as the future of finance is indeed a possibility, if not a probability.

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Lawyer

Average Annual Salary: $121,000

It’s a toss-up for ENTPs. Are they best suited to take their skills at learning and processing news and becoming a financial analyst, or should they focus on their innate ability to debate and argue and become a trial attorney? The career of a lawyer is uniquely suited to ENTPs, and they’re bound to do well if they pick the right type of law to focus on.

ENTPs are not ones to get caught up in the minutia of something like real estate law, where they must study past laws and apply them to modern situations, sometimes taking months or longer to come up with the answer. ENTPs thrive in a more fast-paced legal environment, one where the right to a speedy trial is critical and fuels their inner desire to right a wrong and prove their point.

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Art Director

Average Annual Salary: $74,000

ENTPs are great brainstormers. They have the ability to come up with novel ideas, one after another. Some of those ideas are impractical because practical thinking isn’t their strong suit, but some of those ideas are phenomenal and ones that other people would have a hard time conceiving.

This skill makes them very qualified in the field of art direction. They can grasp new ideas and send their team off to their desks to make them happen.

Art Directors also need to be able to make quick decisions and sometimes need to persuade others to believe in their vision. An art director can serve the role of salesperson, depending on their employer. If they’re being asked to sell their ideas, they’ll do quite well in this field. The only place where they may fail a bit is in being sensitive about the ideas of others.

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Performing Artist

Average Annual Salary: $59,079

Performance artists have to be very flexible people, moving from one character to another, one emotional song to the next, one painting to maybe even another medium entirely. ENTPs can do this shifting with ease and grace. They are quick to come up with ideas and execute them. They’re great at convincing others, getting them to believe in their role, their vision, their emotions.

They also love to learn and study, so picking up on the nuances of a scene, a musical piece, or a character’s backstory can be fascinating for them and can lend depth to their work.
Software Developer

Average Annual Salary: $80,000

Software developers are constantly coming up with new ideas, trying to break through with the next best thing that everyone needs. These individuals need to be on the cutting edge of just about everything, and that’s where ENTPs comfortably sit on a regular basis.

An ENTP knows what’s happening in the world. They know what people think and want, and they’re pulling all of that knowledge together in their heads and finding solutions. To really be successful, they’re going to need a team of doers behind them who can see the big picture and understand the limitations of technology, but their visionary tendencies can make them leaders and innovators.

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Professor

Average Annual Salary: $142,000

The love of knowledge is going to pull many ENTPs into some teaching field. They do like high-level thinkers, so they’re more inclined to teach at a college level. This can be where they thrive, spewing information at rapidly scribbling notetakers who are excited to learn.

This fuels all aspects of an ENTPs personality as they get to convince others of their point of view and open their eyes to new information. They also get to stay on top of the news and pull that into their lessons.

The only place where an ENTP might feel a little out of water in the classroom is when a strong-minded and strong-willed student has a dissenting point of view and wants to debate. This is going to typically be a clash of ENTPs, and neither of them is going to take it well or listen to the other side. It’s not their strength to listen, just to debate.

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Psychologist

Average Annual Salary: $72,000

A psychologist needs to gather information and form solutions or paths toward recovery. That’s the idea anyway. An ENTP personality is good at this aspect of human interactions. They love information and take it all in as facts, quickly assembling it and making decisions. Pair this ability with years of training, and they have the right solution set at hand so they can help guide a person toward a better approach.

One thing that might seem missing is a compassionate side, as ENTPs are not known for their emotional connections to others, but this is not exactly true. A psychologist needs to be understanding and empathetic to another’s troubles, but there needs to be a professional detachment, or things can get tricky. This is why ENTPs can do quite well in this field. They’re wired this way.

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Physician

Average Annual Salary: $176,000

Physicians are similar in a lot of ways to psychologists. They go in, diagnose a problem, present a solution and move on. Psychologists spend more time with their patients typically, but the concept is all similar. This is why ENTPs are great physicians. They see all of the symptoms and are on top of new medical discoveries. In fact, they want to make those new discoveries most of the time.

Another great reason to look for a physician that’s an ENTP is their ability to stay on top of the prescription market. The number of drugs on the market to treat just one illness can be staggering. Imagine having to know almost all of the prescriptions out there, know which ones have side effects, which ones don’t work well together, etc.

This information alone is daunting unless you’re pre-wired to love gathering information and putting it together as an ENTP does.

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Marketing Consultant

Average Annual Salary: $61,000

Marketing Consultants have their finger on the pulse of what’s trending. As ENTPs, they love gathering information and can almost seem prescient when it comes to predicting trends. These ENTPs tend to lean more toward the creative side than the analytical one, which makes them great in the field of marketing. They understand how to speak to their audience and persuade them to buy, buy, buy.

This is an easy field for an ENTP to thrive in. They’ll quickly rise up the ranks to a position of authority as they’re natural leaders and their ability to read markets makes them highly valued and sought after. It’s basically a dream situation that can bring them lots of financial and professional rewards.

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Private Detective

Average Yearly Salary: $37,000

How about this for a fun career? ENTPs are so good at learning information that they really enjoy discovering it for themselves. They typically won’t do too well in a traditional police detective environment because that’s too structured and regimented for them. They’re rogue.

These rebels want to be on their own, creating their own rules and flying by the seat of their pants. Being a private detective gives them that autonomy and can be a highly rewarding and thrilling field for them.

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What Is an ENTP?

If you’ve come up with the ENTP personality type, you’re categorized by the letters E, N, T, and P.

Extroverted
Intuitive
Thinking
Perceiving

These four personality traits have differing levels of dominance in your personality, and they start from the front and work backward.

Extroverted thinking in ENTPs means they are energized by spending time with others, and they also like to look at things with a big-picture mentality rather than focusing on the details.
Intuitive means that they’re good at sensing things and can make pretty good connections and fuel their intuition. They can reach conclusions that are logical at a fast pace.
Thinking is their tertiary function and, while deep thought and contemplation aren’t lost on them, they’re more apt to be quick decision-makers and not spend much time in thought.
Perceiving is their inferior function, and it points to their ability to look past what’s happening now or what’s happened before and only focus on what might happen in the future.

Strengths and Weaknesses of ENTP People

Individuals who have an ENTP personality are great learners, and they quickly grasp new and abstract ideas. They’re not necessarily studious people. Rather, they are just naturally inquisitive and learn well.

This also helps them become very flexible in their thoughts as they shift from one idea to another. Helping with that is their feeling that they can shift. There’s no need to take in all of the facts or give credence to each side of an argument.

Some strengths that you might see in an ENTP include:

Intelligence
Quick learner and thinker
Novel ideas
Charismatic
Energetic and enthusiastic

Some weaknesses you may discover in an ENTP are:

Argumentative
Insensitive to others
Intolerance
Inability to focus
Ignoring practical matters

Careers ENTP Personality Types May Want to Avoid

Not every career is great for ENTPs. There are some careers where they simply don’t fit in, or they rub others the wrong way. ENTPs can be abrasive, they can be argumentative, and they can be confrontational. This means that the following jobs aren’t going to be good fits for them.

Daycare Provider. Whether it’s daycare or early education, ENTPs simply don’t have the patience or compassion to be great with children, day in and day out, week after week. They’re wired for a faster-paced life and one of more intellectual pursuits.
Airline Pilot. Why wouldn’t an ENTP be a good pilot? Well, nothing much changes in the world of aviation. You learn your job, and then you perform it day in and day out. There’s a lot of job structure, and it all feels like tedium to an ENTP.
Dietician. When you’re telling people what to eat constantly, you get bored. The field of food sciences can be interesting initially, but after you’ve learned the basic science, you’ll need a lot of rapport, understanding and you have to be there to support people. None of this falls into the wheelhouse of an ENTP.
Receptionist. Easily a career where an ENTP is going to feel undervalued. A receptionist is there to greet people, make them feel welcome, and field phone calls and other requests. It’s the same job done with a smile every single day. For an ENTP, this is almost torture. They want to learn and do and try new things, and they don’t want to have to be nice to others.
Home Health Aide. While learning and being on top of medicine is going to appeal to an ENTP, there are so many other careers in the healthcare field that this personality type is better suited for. Home health aides are not just there to take care of the health needs of their patients; they might be their only contact with humans that day or week.

They need to be very understanding and compassionate. They also need to be able to establish a good rapport with family members in case there is a medical emergency or it’s time for a different care option to be discussed.

Never miss an opportunity that’s right for you.

Author

Chris Kolmar

Chris Kolmar is a co-founder of Zippia and the editor-in-chief of the Zippia career advice blog. He has hired over 50 people in his career, been hired five times, and wants to help you land your next job. His research has been featured on the New York Times, Thrillist, VOX, The Atlantic, and a host of local news. More recently, he's been quoted on USA Today, BusinessInsider, and CNBC.

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