Managing Director, Financial Services
Accenture
New York, N.Y.
Karen L. Pavlin is one of many who contends that sports does wonders for female athletes later in their life. “As a collegiate All-American and member of the USA Track & Field, I feel that being a female athlete competing at the highest level gave me six key instrumental dimensions: confidence, unwavering focus, passion, leadership, resilience, and team-building skills,” she says. These dimensions translated into a successful career in business that was best demonstrated during her 20-year tenure with Xerox Business Services at Xerox Corp., where she held several leadership positions in sales, corporate strategy, and global account management. Her exemplary work led to her being named a key global leader for Xerox’s World-wide Alliances and Women in Tech Initiative.
Pavlin later drew on her confidence dimension to shift her career to Accenture, the global management consulting and professional services firm, where she now serves as managing director in financial services. She was featured in the column, “How to Redraw the Boundaries of your Comfort Zone,” a Forbes magazine Q&A series with successful female executives and entrepreneurs. “I talked about how I was able to reinvent myself in the world of “New IT,” digital, innovation, and business transformation at Accenture,” she recalls
Pavlin earned both a bachelor’s in marketing communications and a master’s in marketing and business management at the University of Virginia. She has added diversity and inclusion to her responsibilities at Accenture as a member of the firm’s Inclusion & Diversity Committee. Her personal commitment to improving lives in underserved communities led to a 15-year board membership at iMentor, a nonprofit devoted to helping first-generation college students to graduate and embrace their career aspirations. Her dream is to establish a nonprofit that offers scholarships to women and girls interested in pursuing careers in STEM.
