Our Leadership Team
Kathy Harris, Penny Hopkins and Ethel Kozliner co-founded Jobmatics to achieve their shared vision for the future.
Kathy Harris
Kathy Harris, President of Jobmatics, authored the Career Focusing™, the cornerstone program of Jobmatics.
Kathy worked for 27 years at Queen’s University as a Career Information Specialist. In 1995 she founded Harris Career Consulting. It quickly became a thriving career practice. Using Career Focusing™, Kathy has helped thousands of people at all stages of their career get “unstuck” and figure out what to do next.
Kathy is compelled by her primary purpose in life (her Focus) to remove barriers that stop people from getting to exciting places. She wants every individual and organization/community to be clear about what they want to be doing and to be free to find their best opportunities. As part of the career industry, Kathy had been frustrated because good people were not having the impact on people’s lives that Kathy wanted to make. This frustration and her Focus led Kathy to fill the gap by developing her step-by-step, “how to” make career decisions program and to train others to use it with their clients.
Realizing that how to make career decisions is a fundamental skill that everyone should have, in 2004, Kathy partnered with Penny Hopkins, a retired guidance head and Ethel Kozliner, an individual and organizational development specialist, and together they created Jobmatics.
Kathy is an executive coach, trainer and consultant in the fields of individual and organizational development, career and labour market information and personality temperament. She held leadership roles in national organizations and won awards for her abilities to stimulate collaborative behaviours and to motivate people into action. She works extensively with First Nations, Métis and Inuit Peoples to equip communities and their people to identify their best opportunities and to set concrete, easy to implement plans to achieve them. Kathy is a frequent speaker at conferences across Canada and in the United States.
Penny Hopkins
Penny Hopkins, Vice President of Jobmatics, partnered with Kathy to translate Career Focusing™ into school curriculum that is used across Canada.
Penny learned about Career Focusing™ in 1999. As an experienced Guidance Head at a post-secondary school in Ontario who expended a lot of her personal resources to make sure students could thrive, Penny found Career Focusing™ and recognized it immediately as the missing link for her students.
As a guidance professional, Penny was working extremely hard with the tools available to her. However, she knew that too many of her students were not making informed, intentional decisions or sticking with their choices. Some students were taking every possible course ‘just in case’ they needed them to keep their options open. Some faded out, not taking enough courses to graduate. Others wouldn’t move on, instead taking a 5th year of high school. Penny also saw many students become completely overwhelmed by the overload of options for post-secondary education. She could see clearly that the newly implemented Grade 10 Career Studies class was not proving to be meaningful to her students.
Penny realized that, in order for her students to make decisions that they would stick with, Career Focusing™ was her answer. Students would gain the ability to see that they are headed to work and education that will truly be a good fit for them. She successfully launched the first pilot of Career Focusing™ in the classroom within the Grade 10 Career Studies class at her high school in 2002.
Partnering with Kathy as a co-founder of Jobmatics was a natural evolution from Penny’s work in Guidance and Career Education because of her compelling need for development and improvement. Whether which group she is working with (individual students, schools, boards of education and the province), Penny is pulled to any opportunity to improve their respective situation. She has worked tirelessly developing programs and tools so that every individual and organization in the world will have the ability and know-how to create a good life for themselves – however they define it. It is Penny’s extensive abilities and dedication to development that is helping Jobmatics make a critical contribution to changing the face of education and work so that they are better aligned with today’s realities.
Along her journey as a learner and educator, Penny pioneered an award-winning business/education partnership with a leading telecom company, served as a Board member of the Ontario School Counsellors’ Association and Counsellors for At-Risk Students in Ontario, wrote career development articles for professional journals, facilitated workshops of all kinds and is regularly recruited to present at provincial and national conferences. Penny works extensively with teachers across Canada, including those in Aboriginal communities, to ensure that students have the tools and skills to self-manage their career.
Ethel Kozliner
Ethel Kozliner, Vice President of Jobmatics, is an agent for positive change both within Jobmatics and for its clients.
Early in her career as a toxicologist with Health Canada, Ethel couldn’t help but follow her natural drive to streamline her section’s process to help everyone achieve the group’s goals more efficiently and effectively. When the opportunity presented itself to participate on a team that would bring many departments together into one Agency, she was the natural choice. Ethel applied the analytical skills she enjoyed using as an evaluator to the challenges of process improvement and implementation at the organizational and individual level.
While working at Health Canada, Ethel completed her MBA and knew it was time for change. A family move led her to Queen’s University where she was introduced to Career Focusing™ and ultimately to Kathy.
Ethel realized the tremendous value and potential of Kathy’s innovation not only for the career industry, but also for mainstream business as an individual and organizational development tool. The opportunity to work with Kathy and Penny, co-creating Jobmatics, was perfect timing.
Ethel’s Focus is getting to the best outcomes for everyone. She enjoys working behind-the scenes on our programs, processes and administrative needs, helping to make it possible for our clients, our company and its people to achieve their goals.
Ethel works to support our company as well as many other organizations in her community. She has presented at conferences across Canada as well as in the United States. Ethel was instrumental in bringing our program to life in French as Explo-CarrièreMC.