Top ENFP Careers for Techies

If you’ve spent any time on this big, beautiful funhouse ride we call the internet, you probably have taken one or more personality quizzes. There are personality quizzes all over the place, and many of them go in-depth and do an excellent job of evaluating you. The Myers-Briggs personality exam is a popular personality test that breaks your personality down into four quadrants. Then, it assigns every test taker a four-letter designation. My personality type, for instance, is Extraversion (E), Intuition (N), Feeling (F), and Perception (P). It’s one I share proudly with Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Bob Dylan, Rachel Maddow, and many more of my favorite humans.

Familiarity with ENFP careers isn’t necessarily going to be the magic solution to all of your life’s problems. The more you understand about which careers work best for ENFP personalities, however, it becomes much easier to find a career that suits you. 

Best Careers List for ENFPs

Here are some of the best careers for ENFP personalities:

• Network Engineer
• Digital Design
• UX/UI Development
• Writer

Network Engineer

We all know that computer networks are now ubiquitous parts of the business landscape. But were you aware that network engineers boast one of the best starting salaries for entry-level employees? In addition to all of the touchy-feely aspects of our personality type, ENFP-ers love the experience of tracking down and solving complex network issues. It’s fun and challenging, occupies our entire brain, and gives us a rush every time we fix an issue. As a bonus, network engineers use the sorts of intuition and creativity that ENFP types have. 

To qualify for work as a network engineer, get lots of hands-on training on network equipment. It’s possible to buy used switches and routers for super-duper cheap (seriously—sometimes for pennies). There are also some excellent virtual environments available for free that give you practical experience with pretty much any device out there. Start taking certification courses, too. Cisco and Sun both offer robust training programs and certification tracks that give you everything you need to become a world-class network guru.

Digital Design

ENFP personality types are open-minded, likely with lots of visual creativity and imagination. In the old days, a career as a painter or sculptor would have called to you like one of those rock-dwelling sirens. Nowadays, the digital alternative is just as appealing and potentially profitable. Digital design doesn’t require you to have a college degree to make bank. All that’s needed is a good eye and a desire to create attractive graphics. The job plays well to ENFP strengths and weaknesses. With persistence and self-education, you can start designing graphics for the web and make the world a little nicer.

You might not consider soft skills as important to a digital designer, but communication is crucial and can easily make or break your business. Practice team skills to make communicating with clients or bosses easier.

Get to know the Adobe line of products, too, as Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign all get heavy use when you work with digital graphics. Expose yourself to media in all shapes and sizes, including video, film, music, and more. The more you absorb, the better and more interesting your creations will be.

UX/UI Development

App interfaces have come a long way over the last few decades, haven’t they? You might not think much about the continuous evolution of user interfaces (UI) and user experience (UX), but you better believe that UI/UX developers consider it all the time.

Like digital design, UI/UX design is perfect for ENFP-ers as it lets them get creative and have fun while still allowing a little logic and methodology to dictate their work. If you are empathetic and find it easy to place yourself in other’s shoes, consider making UI/UX design your chosen occupation. 

In addition to the soft skills that serve digital designers (such as communication and teamwork), UI/UX developers should have strong writing skills. Much of the job involves developing and analyzing user testing, evaluations, questionnaires, surveys, and more. 

So, the better you are at written expression, the more effective you are at your job. You might want to brush up on wireframing and prototyping too, which are a UI/UX expert’s bread and butter. Deep knowledge of Sketch, Canva, Proto.io, Figma, and other apps will serve you well.

Writer

You knew it was coming, right? I mean, I’m the one writing this article, and I’m an ENFP. It makes sense that writing, an often deeply creative endeavor, would be a great job for ENFPs. If you think that writing is all novels and short stories, think again. That pesky old internet is packed to the rafters with web pages, and almost all of them contain at least a little writing. A confident writer has no trouble keeping themselves employed and gets a little burst in the pleasure center of the brain every time they come up with… stuff that’s… uh… real good. Give writing a try if you find yourself cringing when you run across badly written websites.

This career is the easiest one of all of them to train for. All that’s required is some time and enough energy to force yourself to the keyboard. Write a little every day— it doesn’t matter what, just keep your hand in. Your voice will strengthen over time, and you’ll get much faster at your work, too.  Visit sites that cater to freelance writers and other job seekers, and above all, read, read, read. Reading about your broad interests keeps your mind flexible in the long term and impacts your own prose by injecting variety into your phrasing. And reading is marvelous entertainment and a fantastic way to spend your time, as a nice bonus.

Conclusion

So there you go, my extroverted, intuitive, feeling, and perceptive readers. Personality tests like the Myers-Briggs test help to point you toward career paths that you might enjoy. This guide shows ENFP personalities a few career choices that are a good fit and pay you to just be yourself.