ESFJ Careers: What Are The Best & Worst Jobs for The Consul?

When it comes to careers, ESFJs (Consuls) have many different options to choose from.

After all, they possess so many skills—communication, interpersonal, and organizational, just to name a few—that can be successfully applied to virtually any field.

While this opens doors to professional opportunities in various industries, it also makes it challenging for ESFJs to decide on a career path.

If this sounds like you, worry not—learning more about your personality type can help you narrow down your options and choose a career that’ll let your innate strengths shine.

This extensive guide to ESFJ careers will cover everything you should know about your unique personality type to make the right career decision.

7 Best Career Paths for ESFJs

First things first, let’s explore the most suitable career paths for ESFJs:

#1. Mental Health and Social Services

As dominant extraverted feeling (Fe) users, ESFJs are highly attuned to other people’s feelings—even more so than to their own emotions.

Thanks to their empathy and high emotional intelligence, they instinctively relate to others and attend to their emotional needs. This, coupled with their excellent communication skills, makes them well-suited for jobs in the field of mental health and social services.

Moreover, ESFJs radiate warmth and compassion. Since this helps people feel comfortable around them, they usually have no trouble establishing rapport with others—even those who find it difficult to open up to strangers.

Not to mention, ESFJs derive satisfaction from helping others, which is why they often gravitate toward jobs such as:

• Social Worker
• Marriage and Family Therapist
• Child Care Worker
• Rehabilitation Counselor
• Substance Use and Recovery Treatment Counselor
• Mental Health Counselor

#2. Education

Consuls, both male and female, are drawn to jobs that enable them to contribute to the betterment of the world in tangible ways. Since they appreciate structured work environments, they typically prefer to work at institutions with a hierarchical organizational structure. As such, it’s no surprise that education is one of the most popular career paths among ESFJs.

Patient and organized ESFJs can be described as natural-born teachers. Not only do they enjoy helping others expand their knowledge and skills, but they also easily connect with people from all walks of life. Because of this, they can successfully teach all types of people, including kids, adults, and those who need special assistance.

Some of the most common education jobs among ESFJs include:

• Special Education Teacher
• Elementary School Teacher
• Adult Education Instructor
• High School Teacher
• Kindergarten Teacher
• Guidance Counselor
• College Professor

#3. Business, Management & Administration

If you’re interested in high-paying jobs for ESFJs, then you can’t go wrong by pursuing a career in business, management, or administration. Thanks to their organizational, communication, and collaboration skills, ESFJs often build successful careers in this field.

It also helps that they easily understand people’s needs, pain points, and expectations. Being highly people-centric, they have a knack for building and maintaining customer loyalty, which is critical to business success. They also tend to be great at driving employee engagement and satisfaction, as they genuinely care about others.

Moreover, ESFJs often have strong leadership abilities due to their decisive, organized, and outgoing nature, which certainly comes in handy in the business world.

Not sure what are the best careers in business for ESFJs? Here are some great options:

• Human Resources Manager
• Office Administrator
• Receptionist
• Corporate Trainer
• Buyer
• Personal Accountant
• Business Development Manager

#4. Healthcare

Healthcare is another career path that ESFJs are often drawn to due to their nurturing and compassionate personalities.

Not only are they invested in helping people, but they are also attentive to detail and prefer jobs that set clear procedures for them to follow. This, coupled with the fact that most Consuls are health-conscious due to their auxiliary introverted sensing (Si), makes healthcare a highly fulfilling career path for ESFJs.

Also, many jobs in healthcare require logical thinking and problem-solving (e.g., figuring out the correct diagnosis for a patient). As such, pursuing a healthcare career can help ESFJs tap into and improve their inferior introverted thinking (Ti) function. Engaging with these cognitive functions also satisfies their need to help others, enhancing their professional fulfillment.

ESFJs are perfectly suited for all kinds of jobs in the healthcare sector, including but not limited to:

• Nurse
• Nutritionist
• Dietitian
• Physical Therapist
• Family Physician
• Dental Hygienist
• Massage Therapist
• Dentist
• Healthcare Administrator
• Optometrist
• Pharmacist
• Recreational Therapist
• Veterinarian
• Occupational Therapist
• Speech-Language Pathologist

#5. Event Planning

Out of all the 16 personalities, ESFJs are undoubtedly the most talented at planning events. After all, if there’s one thing Consuls are famous for, it’s being hospitable, organized, and focused on ensuring that everyone’s happy and having a good time.

Event planning comes naturally to ESFJs, as many of them throw parties and host get-togethers at their homes from a very young age. They also have unbeatable organizational and communication skills, helping them coordinate the logistics of any event—big or small—with ease.

Better yet, ESFJs also possess strong negotiation skills, which can help them land better deals with venues, vendors, and the like.

ESFJs can put their gift for organizing gatherings and bringing people together to good use by choosing any of the following jobs:

• Event Coordinator/Planner/Manager
• Catering Manager
• Fundraising Manager
• Wedding Planner
• Venue Manager
• Campaign Coordinator

#6. Sales

Being rather energetic, Consuls enjoy working in fast-paced environments that require them to regularly communicate with lots of different people. So, it goes without saying that sales is one of the best career paths for ESFJs.

Empathetic and observant, ESFJs easily connect with customers on a personal level, allowing them to gain insight into their needs and concerns. This helps them identify the best product or service for each customer and foster long-term relationships with them. For measuring and enhancing customer satisfaction, ESFJs can benefit from NPS tool.

Not only that, but this also makes them quite persuasive, which can help them close sales. As such, ESFJs often make excellent:

• Sales Representatives
• Retail Managers
• Advertising Sales Agents
• Insurance Sales Agents
• Real Estate Sales Agents
• Account Managers
• Merchandise Planners
• Account Executives
• Customer Service Representatives

#7. Media and Communications

Given that Consuls enjoy collaborating with others and are gifted communicators, it’s only natural that they can build successful careers in media and communications. However, not all jobs in this field are suitable for ESFJs.

Since they aren’t particularly adaptable, they should avoid very creative roles that lack stability (e.g., freelance writer). They tend to feel more comfortable in positions with clearly defined responsibilities, especially those that involve plenty of teamwork or one-on-one communication with people.

So, here are some great career options for ESFJs interested in media and communications:

• Public Relations Specialist/Manager
• Journalist
• Technical Writer
• Brand Strategist
• News Anchor

What Careers Should ESFJs Avoid?

Now that you know what career paths are perfectly suited for Consuls, here are three ESFJ careers to avoid:

#1. Programming

ESFJs thrive in client-facing roles, which makes programming one of the worst career paths for them. As extroverts, Consuls enjoy interacting with people—be they customers, clients, or coworkers—during their working hours. Without regular human interaction, their motivation and job satisfaction are bound to take a hit.

Not only that, but programming doesn’t provide them with opportunities to utilize their strengths, such as empathy and effective communication. For this reason, ESFJs looking for a job won’t miss out on anything if they skip job listings aimed at:

• Software Developers
• Database Administrators
• Systems Analysts

#2. Engineering

Like programming, engineering is a largely solitary career path that isn’t likely to bring fulfillment to ESFJs.

Although their attention to detail would be greatly appreciated in this field, Consuls tend to avoid technical jobs that heavily rely on analytical thinking and problem-solving. This isn’t to say that they can’t think analytically and solve problems. They can, of course, but too much of either will drain them—especially without enough social interaction.

Not to mention, engineering is a constantly developing industry—more so than many other fields. Since continuous learning isn’t a top priority for ESFJs, they may find it challenging to keep up with the latest advancements and trends in this sector.

Needless to say, ESFJs aren’t likely to build fulfilling careers as:

• Cloud Engineers
• Software Engineers
• Mechanical Engineers
• Electrical Engineers
• Civil Engineers
• Chemical Engineers

#3. Entrepreneurship

Although being a successful entrepreneur goes hand in hand with communicating and collaborating with others, ESFJs should ideally avoid this job.

Simply put, ESFJs like structure and stability in all areas of life, including work. As such, entrepreneurship in and of itself isn’t suitable for Consuls, as it involves taking risks and hoping that things will work out in your favor. Since they like to play it safe and may feel stressed out by uncertainty, ESFJs should better avoid entrepreneurial endeavors.

What Are ESFJs Like as Leaders?

As leaders, ESFJs are supportive, practical, organized, and responsive. Thanks to their innate empathy and strong sense of responsibility, they equally prioritize group harmony and results. As such, they tend to lead with compassion but also stress the importance of consistent work and timely task completion, making them highly effective leaders.

Although ESFJs believe that organizational hierarchy should be respected and preserved, they make down-to-earth, approachable leaders. Above all else, they strive to ensure that the people on their team get along and have all the tools, support, and resources they need to work productively and meet their objectives.

Moreover, ESFJ leaders typically expect everyone to contribute to the team—including themselves—which helps foster a sense of belonging. However, they may show people-pleasing tendencies, which could affect their decision-making. After all, the last thing ESFJs want to do is disappoint others.

What Are ESFJs Like as Teammates?

As teammates, ESFJs are helpful, enthusiastic, and supportive. When it comes to work, nothing brings them quite as much joy as collaborating with others and working towards common goals. For this reason, ESFJs take teamwork rather seriously.

Not only do they make every effort to maintain harmonious relationships with their teammates, but they also strive to ensure that no one feels left out. Creating a positive work atmosphere is of utmost importance to them, so ESFJs are very attentive to their teammates. More than anything, they want everyone to feel comfortable, heard, and valued.

As sociable as ESFJs are, they’re also task-oriented. They enjoy working in structured teams where everyone knows their responsibilities and diligently fulfills their duties. However, they may find chaos, interpersonal conflict, and excessive competitiveness among their teammates very stressful, which could negatively affect their performance.

ESFJ Strengths and Weaknesses at the Workplace

The key to choosing the right career path as an ESFJ is knowing your strengths and weaknesses. Ideally, you should look for a job that allows you to capitalize on your core strengths and downplay—or, better yet, improve—your weaknesses.

On that note, let’s look into the main strengths and weaknesses ESFJs tend to display at work, starting with their strong points:

• People skills. By nature, ESFJs possess a wide array of people skills—empathy, collaboration, communication, and patience, among others—that help them build close relationships with their coworkers and clients.
• Organizational skills. ESFJs excel at managing their time and resources, prioritizing tasks, meeting deadlines, and the like. They also have great attention to detail.
• Sense of responsibility. Organized, dedicated, and responsible, ESFJs are the type of people you can trust to do the job correctly and on time. Since they’re more focused on the collective than the individual, they also help their coworkers whenever they can.

Meanwhile, the key ESFJ weaknesses that could affect their career include:

• Inflexibility. ESFJs may have a hard time adapting to change and trying out new—potentially better—ways of getting their tasks done. They may also be very hesitant to take risks.
• Overcommitment. ESFJs may take on more tasks than they can handle due to their responsible natures. Since they often struggle with delegation, this could lead to burnout.
• Sensitivity to criticism. ESFJs tend to take criticism to heart. Because of this, they also may withhold negative feedback from others to protect their feelings, thus preventing them from improving.

10 Best College Majors for ESFJs

Most ESFJ careers we covered require you to have a college degree, so you should choose your major accordingly.

That said, if you haven’t made up your mind yet on which career path you want to pursue, here are 10 solid college major options that’ll set any ESFJ on the right track:

1. Business Administration
2. Psychology
3. Education
4. Social Work
5. Public Relations
6. Accounting
7. Nursing
8. Human Resources Management
9. Communications
10. Health Science

Key Takeaways

And that wraps up everything you need to know about the best and worst ESFJ careers!

Before you leave, let’s go over the key points we covered:

• Thanks to their diverse career skills, ESFJs can excel in various career paths, but some of the most suitable ones for them are education, healthcare, and business.
• The worst careers for ESFJs are those that force them to work alone or take risks, which is why Consuls should avoid programming, engineering, and entrepreneurship.
• ESFJs make great leaders and coworkers thanks to their people skills, talent for organization, and responsible nature, but they may be inflexible and highly sensitive to criticism.

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