So you’ve taken the Myers Briggs personality test and found out that you’re an INFP type, aka “The Mediator” or “The Healer.”
Now what?
Well, in addition to helping you better understand yourself, your habits and tendencies, and potential growth areas, knowing your personality type should impact how you look at your career.
Since a career is something you plan to do for a long time, making sure it aligns with your unique skills and personality traits is an important step to securing long-term happiness and fulfillment in life.
To help you put the information you’ve learned about yourself from Myers Briggs into context and use it as part of your career search, we’ve put together this summary of the INFP personality and come up with a list of the best careers for this personality type.
INFPs: A Small But Important Part of the Population
Overall, INFPs make up around four percent of the population, and are most often female. This can make it hard for them to find connection, especially with other men, who often see this type as weak or excessively sensitive.
Let’s dive into the INFP personality.
The INFP Personality
The Myers Briggs system uses a series of questions to categorize personalities according to four different preferences: Introversion (I)/Extroversion (E); Intuition (N)/Sensing (S); Thinking (T)/Feeling (F); Judging (J)/ Prospecting (P).
The sixteen different personality types come from the different combinations of these dichotomies.
As an INFP, your personality is defined by Introversion (I), INtuition (N), Feeling (F), and Perceiving (P). Let’s dive into what this means:
Introversion
This preference refers where you like to spend most of your time: the inner world or the outer world.
As you might of guessed, having an introversion tendency means preferring the inner world.
Being introverted also means that you get your energy from being alone. Often these individuals find being around lots of people very long periods of time to be very draining.
Intuition
Having a preference for Intuition means that you spend more time working out patterns and connections within the information you get. You like to think through your sensorial experiences to try and find meaning and gain better understanding.
As someone with an intuition tendency, your focus tends to be more on the big picture. You approach problem solving by trying to think through the best solution, but you’re not afraid to present unique or unorthodox solutions.
Feeling
The third preference is Feeling, which means you tend to place a great deal of importance on how your decisions will affect others before you make them.
In fact, this is such a concern of yours that you often won’t do something if you think it might negatively affect someone in any way. This is a noble trait, but it can also stand in your way if you’re not careful.
Perceiving
Lastly, INFPs prefer to emphasize their openness and spontaneity when they project themselves to the world, a preference known as Perceiving. Many INFPs desire structure and organization, but they tend to repress this side of themselves when interacting with other people.
INFPs: The Healers/Mediators
According to the Myers Briggs system, “INFP” is the most accurate description of your personality type. But even after you’ve dissected the meanings of each letter, this moniker doesn’t quite capture the essence of the INFP.
This is where the archetype of the “healer” or “mediator” comes in handy.
INFPs are known as “healers” or “mediators” because of their:
- Empathy – INFPS don’t just understand someone else’s emotions. They are able to experience them, allowing them to form deep connections with other people.
- Communication skills – This empathy allows INFPs to relate to people and facilitate communication, even among groups that seem very different.
- Values – INFPs want to make the world a better place. They want to use their skills to help others heal and grow, hence the name “healer.”
Finding jobs that play to these traits will set you up for a much more rewarding and successful career.
INFJ Strengths
Career paths that play to your strengths as an INFP will make you feel the most fulfilled. This means finding jobs that allow you to be:
- Creative – Introversion and Intuition preferences allow INFPs to be great story tellers and artists. Many desire to be or actually are writers, even if this isn’t their profession.
- Strategic – INFPs enjoy problem solving and are highly-motivated to finding innovative solutions to complex problems.
- Imaginative– INFPs like to imagine the ideal world. They want to think outside the box and challenge what people think they know.
- Open-Minded – INFPs empathetic nature allows them to embrace new ideas and concepts easily.
INFJ Weaknesses
Knowing where one can improve is also useful in the job search. Such awareness helps you avoid certain jobs while also indicating where you need to place more attention when you do finally take on a new role.
Areas where INFPs could stand to improve include:
- Being too idealistic – Having ideals is good, but only when they don’t prevent you from bring realistic. INFPs need to remember that incremental progress is still progress.
- Emotional overload – INFP empathy is a huge strength, but it also means you need to make sure you’re establishing boundaries and taking space to prevent overload.
- Excessive introversion – Internal life is so interesting and exciting to an INFP that they can sometimes get completely consumed by it and forget about what’s happening on the outside.
- Self-criticism – Due to their concern and almost obsession with the ideal way of doing things, INFPs tend to be hardest on themselves. They therefore must cultivate a lot of compassion and patience with themselves to be able to really thrive.
Best Careers for INFPs
Now that you have an even deeper understanding of the INFP personality, let’s dig into some careers that play to your strengths while also giving you the chance to grow in areas where you are weaker.
Here’s a list of the best INFP careers:
INFP Careers in Digital Marketing
Of all the career matches for an INFP, digital marketing is perhaps one of the most aligned.
First, it’s marketing. Doing it successfully means getting into the minds and hearts of the consumer, identifying with their pains and needs, and coming up with ways of communicating to them that the product or service you’re offering can address those needs.
As professional empaths, INFPs excel at this type of work.
What makes digital marketing so special is that it’s:
- In demand – This is a growing field with lots of opportunities. Some initial training plus a drive to succeed may be all you need to get started.
- Mostly online – Digital marketing is full of remote opportunities, giving INFPs the freedom to work independently.
- Versatile – Due to its broad reach, you can find all sorts of digital marketing jobs.
Some of the best career paths within digital marketing for INFPs are:
Content Marketing Specialist
Content marketing is a form of digital marketing that focuses on, well, content. Its aim is to create and provide materials for the target audience so as to gain trust and notoriety, which leads to interest from new customers and loyalty from old ones.
Such a role really plays into the INFP personality.
Why Content Marketing is a Good Fit for INFPs?
First, it’s highly creative: good content marketing starts by crafting the right story to tell.
Since so much of the internet takes place on blogs, expect to do a lot of writing, or at least be prepared to be involved in the writing process.
A successful content marketing also needs a keen understanding of the target audience, something INFPs get through their empathy. And since the end goal of much of the content you will produce is to help others, this career allows INFPs to pursue their values as relentlessly as they need.
SEO Strategist
INFPs are also well suited to be an SEO strategist. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it refers to the process of designing web content so that it shows up at or near the top of search engine results.
There are many factors that go into determining search rankings, and it’s not always clear what will work. Being successful requires a good deal of creativity as well as a willingness to think outside the box. Being good at writing helps loads too!
What does an SEO strategist do?
As an SEO strategist, you would be responsible for analyzing data, looking at competitors, and implementing solutions to improve search engine rankings, and you’ll be creating and promoting lots of content, giving you the chance to scratch your creative itch.
PPC Analyst
If you want to get even more specific, consider a career as a PPC analyst. PPC stands for pay-per-click and it refers to the ads that appear at the top and on the sides of search engine results pages.
What Does a PPC Analyst Do?
Anyone can pay for these ads, but getting them to show up on the first page requires you to be rather creative. There may be a little less writing than the other digital marketing positions, but as a PPC analyst, you’d be expected to figure out a strategy that improves the visibility of your ads.
This means coming up with the right copy, but also targeting the right terms, so that, in just a few short words, you can establish a connection with the end user, something an INFP can do quite well thanks to their empathetic nature.
In such a role, you will spend more time in one specific area of marketing, but your focus must remain on the big picture. This, plus the independent nature of the work of a PPC analyst, make it an ideal position for an INFP.
Get Your Digital Marketing Career Started Today
If digital marketing sounds like it might be a career path you’d like to pursue, but you don’t feel like you have the education or qualifications to start, you’re in luck.
You don’t need a specific bachelor’s degree or even any degree, really. Instead, you just need a basic understanding of digital marketing and how it works, and then you can apply your unique skills and experiences to win your first job.
Start your career in digital marketing by taking our free masterclass. You will learn everything you need to get your career in digital marketing started right away.
Other INFP Careers
If digital marketing doesn’t feel like the right career for you, there are other options you can pursue. Here are some other INFP careers you should consider:
Counselor/Psychologist
Due to their ability to empathize and understand other people, INFPs often excel in a role as a counselor, psychologist, social worker, or therapist. Such a career matches nicely with your desire to help others improve their lives, and it also puts to use your strong communication skills.
Teacher or Coach
Careers that allow INFPs to see the impact they are having on others, and how they are making the world a better place, tend to be far more rewarding and fulfilling than they are for people with other personality types.
Teaching and coaching also require great deals of empathy as well as strong communication skills and a firm commitment to your values, all strong points of the INFP.
Human Resource Specialist
Lastly, INFPs often find a career in human resources to be highly rewarding. As advocates for fellow employees, this role matches with INFPs’ desire to help others and make the world a better place. You will also be required to be the middle ground, quite literally the mediator, between employees and management, allowing you to put your skills to work on a regular basis.
Find The Right Career for You
As an INFP, you have one of the rarest personalities you can have.
Highly creative, equipped with excellent communication skills and a firm commitment to values, and oriented to help others and make the world a better place, INFPs are driven, artistic, and adaptable, meaning they can thrive in many different roles.
Digital marketing is one INFP career that stands out as being uniquely suited to the INFP personality type. Learn how you can get started in this exciting field today.
But no matter which path you take, choosing jobs that are aligned with your unique INFP personality is critical to your overall happiness and well-being. Spend some time searching within yourself and soon you will find the career that you were born to have.
