Vireo Labs, a Savannah-based startup, announced its partnership with Alpha Omega Associates, which will serve as the research and psychometrics team for the company.  Vireo Labs is building its first mobile product, which will showcase a next-generation vocational assessment. AOA team members include:

Dr. Meghan Lowery, an Industrial/Organizational psychologist with Fortune 500 business consulting experience, will leverage her background for strategic project management and psychological measurement.

Dr. Joel Nadler, an organizational consultant and professor of Industrial/Organizational psychology, will coordinate the measurement, statistical analyses, and psychometric validation processes.

Dr. Jane Swanson, a nationally renowned vocational psychologist, will bring expertise on career theories and psychological measurement to the forefront, and has published and served in prestigious positions such as the Chair of the Society for Vocational Psychology.

The team from AOA will work with the Vireo Labs’ product development team to build an assessment more in line with the needs, goals and interests of today’s workforce.

“The most widely used vocational assessment was originally built for the U.S. workforce shortly after World War I and has only been updated a handful of times since,” said Jose Mallabo. “At a time when identifying career paths and matching them with education are more important than ever, we felt it was time to bring the vocational assessment into the 21st century and its multimedia landscape and larger, more diverse workforce.”

Vireo Labs pointed to the following trends as drivers for its first product:

-80 percent of teens use a mobile device to visit a college website (source: Chegg), but only half of all colleges have a mobile responsive website (source Noel Levitz);

-86 percent of mobile usage is app based (source: Flurry Analytics);

-18.1 million U.S. students will attend college this year – which is up 38 percent since 2000 (source: National Center for Education Statistics); and

-4-year private schools spend a median $2,433 to recruit a single student (source: Noel Levitz)