When Morgan Montgomery first started thinking about what she might do as a career, the job she has now wasn’t even on her radar. Nonetheless, the Continuous Improvement Leader at Rolls-Royce feels like she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.
She did take an indirect route to get here. When she was a student at Carmel High School, she saw herself going to med school. But AP chemistry derailed that idea in her junior year. So, she sat down and considered what she is good at, and all signs pointed toward a career in business.
She headed off to Purdue figuring she would go into marketing, but an internship with Columbus-based Cummins derailed that idea after her freshman year. But this time it wasn’t a problem that changed her mind; it was an experience.
Unlike her marketing intern peers, Montgomery was assigned to do marketing analysis, and she loved everything about it: donning safety gear and striding across factory floors to talk with engineers, crunching numbers, being trusted with an assignment and working independently to complete it, and learning about how the plant operates.
Internships the next two summers with Rolls-Royce in Indianapolis confirmed her decision. Working again with engineers and having plenty of opportunities to be on the factory floor, she was excited by what she describes as “the wonder of advanced manufacturing.”
At both Cummins and Rolls-Royce, Montgomery says, she enjoyed being in environments that emphasized learning and development and encouraged her to take initiative. After graduating from Purdue, she was hired at Rolls-Royce and entered the firm’s Supply Chain Management Graduate Development Program. As part of that program, she found herself in charge of a 30-member production team in Walpole, Mass.
“My assignment as Production Leader was a very daunting job, but definitely the most fulfilling,” she said. “I’m appreciative for the trust that the operations team put in me, and for the opportunity to lead such a motivated team.”
After the Production Leader rotation had ended, Montgomery assumed her current position, remaining in the Boston area to oversee continuous improvement programs for Rolls-Royce Defense – Naval Marine.
Meanwhile, she’s also working on her own continuous improvement, pursuing a master’s degree from Purdue – but, again, in an area she probably never would have imagined. She sees a lot of engineers going back to school for an MBA so they can better understand the business side of their work; she’s decided she should try to further understand the engineering side. So her degree will be a Master’s in Engineering Technology.
After all, Montgomery has proven that success doesn’t always come from choosing a course and sticking to it. “It’s about wanting to be successful, showing you have the right skillset and being excited,” she says. “That has definitely gotten me far.”
