Bio | Kathy L. Sims

Director
UCLA Career Center

Since 1995 Kathy L. 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 cumulative thirty-four years in career services also includes career counseling and management positions at West Virginia and Bowling Green State universities.
At UCLA she introduced a distributive model of counseling service delivery, overhauled employer relations, increased annual revenues 800%, and created highly acclaimed publications and programs including the annual hallmark series, Career Week. She has implemented web-based technologies for career/job development, and expanded career services for graduate students and special populations, championed an early student engagement strategy, secured dedicated staffing to direct annualized funding campaigns and on-going development events, and serves in a variety of campus-wide leadership roles. Sims designed and currently co-directs the UCLA Student Affairs Management Leadership Program with Vice Chancellor Montero.

Sims has addressed numerous employer and college audiences 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 been interviewed for numerous regional and national print and broadcast media. Sims also serves as a consultant internationally, working with developing universities and industries in Japan, Mexico, China, and Algeria. Sims is a founding faculty member of the Career Services Institute, co-creator of the University Network (UN), a national benchmarking group for directors of selected large university career centers, and a founding partner in the development of NACElink™ (the nation’s premier career services management platform).

In 2000-01, she served as President of the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). She was inducted into the Academy of Fellows, NACE’s highest honor, in 2002, and in 2006 was named the recipient of the prestigious Kaufman Award for “leadership that significantly advanced the career services profession.” She has been a faculty member of NACE’s Management Leadership Institute for ten years. Sims 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).

Sims holds BS and MS degrees from West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV.