We invited Dr. Patrick O. Monahan to take the full assessment and share his professional opinion. He did so independently and received no payment for his review. Dr. Monahan is a Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science at the Indiana University School of Medicine and Fairbanks School of Public Health, and Director of the Biostatistics and Data Management Core at the IU Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center. A specialist in psychometric measurement and validity, he is exactly the kind of expert whose work is to judge whether an instrument actually measures what it claims to. He first reviewed the assessment in early 2026, and then took the current, rebuilt version again in mid-2026, calling it “a solid foundation.” After completing it, he assessed how our personality dimensions line up with the established Big Five framework and concluded:
“It has face validity by overlapping a lot with personality science (Big 5) but also partially going its own way in directions that make practical sense.”
In plain terms: someone whose entire job is measurement looked at what we built, from the outside, and found that it lines up with real personality science, not just with our own opinion of what should matter.
He also noted something specific about how we ask the questions. Because every item is framed inside a real work situation rather than as an abstract statement about yourself, he pointed to a second kind of validity beyond the Big Five overlap:
“Your questions were all phrased in the work setting. That gives a lot of context-specific content validity for what you’re doing.”
One note on scope. Dr. Monahan mapped the personality dimensions against the Big Five as a measurement specialist; the ten soft-skill ladders are separately anchored to their own published rubrics (the AAC&U, Facione, and Thomas-Kilmann frameworks cited on the assessment page). His review spans both the original instrument and this year's rebuild. He took the current version himself and found the same overlap with established science, so his read on construct validity applies to the assessment you take today.
Face validity is the first rung an instrument has to clear; it isn't the last. The work of proving the assessment predicts how teams perform together is covered under Validation, and we're candid about the limits of self-report throughout.
The results matched the person
Sound constructs are one thing; an accurate portrait of a real individual is another. This is where the review carried the most weight, because Dr. Monahan wasn't judging the theory, he was reading his own results. The assessment summarized him as a “reflective, adaptive” personality, which he called “a good fit,” and its dimension-by-dimension read (moderately introverted, slightly analytical, strongly flexible, slightly collaborative and methodical) “all seemed to be a pretty good fit” in his words.
The soft-skill results held up the same way. His top skills came back as adaptability, conflict resolution, and critical thinking, which he called “a very good fit,” with the rest landing mid-range, which he judged “the right fit.” He also singled out the interpretive layer, the “friction and what helps” narrative each profile generates, as “on target” and “very useful.”
That is the test that matters for a working tool. As he put it, the bottom line is whether people find it useful: “and I found the summary results very useful, the personality part and the skills.” An instrument can be well-built in theory and still miss the individual in front of it. In an independent measurement scientist's own case, ours didn't.
About our reviewer. Outside his university work, Dr. Monahan is passionate about human-behavior science and homelessness and housing innovation, the focus of his ‘Home at Last’ initiative, featured by IU News.