Looking to differentiate itself from other personality assessment tools, Paradigm partnered with Dualboot to bring its vision for a data-driven, interactive, online behavioral product suite to life.

Personality science can facilitate talent development and combat employee turnover and burnout. That’s one reason the personality assessment market is predicted to grow from $7.4 billion today to $16.4 billion by 2028. Paradigm Personality Labs, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, aims to benefit from The Insight Partners’ estimate of a 12.1 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in this market. With their well-established WorkPlace Big Five Profile™ product suite, they’re also targeting the global corporate wellness market poised to grow at a 4.4% CAGR from $53 billion in 2022.

There are many assessment tools out there. You’ve probably taken several yourself already. Paradigm, however, is working with Dualboot to become a technological frontrunner offering interactive tools to support development and personal growth.

Paradigm believes personality assessments should offer much more than typing people,” says CEO Lisa Dunbar. “Telling people that they are a certain color or persona misses the nuance of each of us and the contexts in which we work and live.” Instead, Paradigm’s interactive suite creates the conditions for individual well-being and organizational success by bringing personality, work, and collaboration together. This helps people understand how to leverage their unique personality footprints to thrive and positively engage with work.

That’s where Dualboot comes in. Developing a customizable, user-friendly online experience encourages greater use of Paradigm’s products and offers workforce development at scale for organizations.

In late 1980, a husband and wife team of respected organizational development consultants began using the Big Five Model with their clients and saw tremendous potential to adapt it to the world of work. They grew their efforts into a global company, the Center for Applied Cognitive Studies (CentACS), providing top-quality behavioral assessments, including the flagship WorkPlace Big Five Profile™. In 2018, current CEO Lisa Dunbar purchased the company and renamed it Paradigm Personality Labs.

Dunbar saw opportunities to expand the company’s reach through digital transformation and emerging personality science. The assessment field was growing, with a vision to be recognized as the “go-to expert in personality at work” Paradigm needed to develop a robust, scalable platform that “transforms role alignment, communication, and collaboration to increase well-being and performance.”

Yet the company lacked the internal development depth to make it happen, Dunbar says, “We had a system that was about to crash. We were in a sorry state.”

Paradigm hired an external development company, but the results were severely disappointing. “They were not efficient and they did not communicate well,” says Paradigm’s Chief Innovation Officer John Lipinski. “We were in a bind.”

That’s when Paradigm discovered Dualboot Partners and made the switch.

With Dualboot’s developers spearheading the transition, Paradigm could become a true technology company. “The difference between the quality and the relationship and the communication was like night and day,” Lipinksi says. “We got done in three months what the previous development group failed to do in a year.”

Working with Dualboot, Paradigm first redeveloped two of its flagship products for online use. The third product development effort, a fully interactive dashboard and reporting tool that aggregates personality assessment data across a team, launches this fall.

Additionally, the company’s product suite now also integrates seamlessly with other human resource technologies, such as WorkDay, to simplify access and information sharing.

Lipinski credits the successful partnership to “very open, very transparent conversations about what we needed and what the timelines are.” He acknowledges there were budget constraints — “we keep things really tight” — but by focusing on “what needs to get done” and “a deep trust in shared goals and vision and what we wanted to accomplish” Dualboot positioned Paradigm to realize its technological aspirations.

Paradigm has enjoyed strong continuity as Dualboot has transitioned people in and out of the project as needed since 2019. “The developers that we have had have always been very high quality… Now we have a group of developers that really know our product well, that are able to help us figure out different and better ways of doing things.” Lipinski says.

The newly launched online assessments, interactive dashboards, and practitioners’ toolkits are just the beginning. “Dualboot has given us an opportunity not just to very quickly make up for some lost time but also to continue to grow,” Lipinski says.

With Dualboot’s support, Paradigm can continue to grow its dashboards and web-based reporting and add to its certification and toolkit libraries. In the next phase of its continued growth Paradigm plans to incorporate emerging technologies that support the integration of personality data insights into their natural workflow so that individuals can seamlessly accelerate their professional growth and renew their workplace energy.

With its strong foundation, Paradigm is now poised to transform itself into a full-fledged Software as a Service (SaaS) platform providing direct-to-employee interactive experiences. Lipinski says the company can now do so without also worrying about finding the right technical partners to support the work. ”Dualboot has given us confidence that the direction we want to take is really attainable.”