Bio

Kathy L. Sims
Director
UCLA Career Center

Since 1995 Kathy Sims has served as Director of the UCLA Career Center. For the previous fourteen years she was Executive Director of The George Washington University Career Center in Washington, DC.  Her thirty-one years in career services also includes career counseling/administrative positions at West Virginia and Bowling Green State universities.

At UCLA she has introduced a distributive model of counseling service delivery, overhauled employer relations, and increased annual revenues 800%.  She championed an early outreach effort to include Center sponsorship of numerous student groups and secured dedicated staffing to direct annualized funding campaigns and on-going development events.   Sims serves in a variety of campus-wide and Student Affairs initiatives such as designing and co-facilitating the Student Affairs Management Leadership Program with the Vice Chancellor.

Sims is co-creator of the University Network (UN), a national benchmarking group for directors of selected large university career centers, a founding partner in the development of a non-profit alliance that provides career services systems tools to universities nationwide (NACElink), and a founding faculty member of this Institute.  She has addressed numerous employer and college audiences, domestically and internationally, on the topics of branding, marketing, campus culture, and the future of career services.  She has appeared on the NBC Nightly News, ABC's Good Morning America, CNN, French network television, and is interviewed regularly by regional and national print, online, and broadcast media.

In 2000-01, she served as President of the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) and in 2006 was named the recipient of their Kaufman Award for outstanding service, the seventh to earn it since it’s inception in 1992.  In 2002 she was inducted into the Academy of Fellows, NACE’s highest honor.  Sims recently served as Chair of the Governance Transition Task Force.  She has been a faculty member of NACE’s Management Leadership Institute for six years.  She previously served two terms on the Executive Board of the Mid-Atlantic Association of Colleges and Employers, earned their Outstanding Service Award in 1993, a Milestone Award in 1997, and from the Eastern College and Employer Network, the Presidential Award in 1996, for chairing the task force that led to the successful merger of these two organizations into the Eastern Association of Colleges & Employers (EACE).