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UVU's Career Development Center is excited to host Sione Havili as a guest speaker for the Create Your Career speaker series. The presentation will be on Tuesday, February 28th at noon in the Ragan Theater. 

Sione Havili, whose parents originate from the Kingdom of Tonga, was born and raised in Glendale, Utah. His father Tevita was a bus driver for 38 years and his mother Elva was a homemaker successfully raising all 8 Havili children. After graduating from East High School in Salt Lake City, Utah, Sione signed a letter of intent to play football at Brigham Young University. Prior to enrolling at BYU though, he was involved in a gang-related aggravated arson in retaliation of a drive-by shooting, convicted of a 1st Degree Felony, and served time to pay his debt to society. Upon his release, Sione eventually earned a football scholarship to Texas Tech University, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2005.

Sione currently serves a Regional Vice President of Sales at Domo Inc. As an active Board Member of the Utah Polynesian Professionals, he’s passionate about helping other Pacific Islanders, Women, and other underrepresented minorities land break-through job opportunities in Tech. He’s also a strong advocate with assisting Convicted Felons find meaningful 2nd chance employment opportunities in the workplace. In October of 2021, a documentary was produced on his remarkable life journey titled, “Redeemed: The Sione Havili Story”. He is happily married to his high school sweetheart Lini Kioa, they have 5 beautiful kids, and they reside in Sandy, Utah.

In recent years, Sione has been able to share his story to many youth groups across the U.S., major universities - such as BYU Hawaii & University of Utah, as well as several notable corporations, namely Salesforce and Google. “Talks at Google” is Google’s foremost speaker series program broadcasted to all Google employees (at the time 200k+ employees) to highlight influential thinkers, creators, makers and doers about what drives them to shape the world. Notable “Talks at Google” Alumni include Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga, George R. R. Martin and many more.