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Carol’s Calling: Meet an Award-Winning Supply Chain Leader at Johnson & Johnson Carol’s Calling: Meet an Award-Winning Supply Chain Leader at Johnson & Johnson

"Supply chain is built for women," according to Carol Montandon. Learn more, including how you can follow in her footsteps and join her on our team.

Chief Quality Officer (CQO) and Global Vice President of Quality and Compliance: These are Carol Montandon's titles today. And when you're employed by the world’s largest and most diversified healthcare products company, that's a pretty heavy lift.

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Carol Montandon, Chief Quality Officer (CQO) and Global Vice President of Quality and Compliance

Carol explained her responsibilities like this: "In a nutshell, I'm proactively managing risk. I'm looking to identify and mitigate risks from end to end, from the moment our research and development team comes up with an idea for a new product all the way through to the delivery of that product to our customers. My team and I are responsible for ensuring that we deliver high-quality products that meet customer and patient expectations and are fully compliant with health authority regulations all around the world.”

Core responsibilities aside, Carol has a lot of other stuff going on as well. For example, she's currently the enterprise leader of one of our flagship employee resource groups, Women's Leadership and Inclusion (WLI), and serves as the chair of its global board.

The group is obviously special to Carol.

"I’ve benefited from it in innumerable ways," she said. "In fact, it's pretty much been a part of my life since I joined Johnson & Johnson 28 years ago."

What initially brought her to our team?



How Carol Found Her Calling

Admittedly, Carol's journey to the supply chain executive ranks wasn’t exactly something she meticulously planned. "I fell into it a little bit by accident,” she confessed.

Quick backstory: After graduating from college with a degree Medical Technology, Carol moved from the U.S. to Switzerland, where, as she recounted, "I was looking for a job and wound up getting hired by a U.S. pharmaceutical company. Honestly, I think I got the job because I spoke English. Either way, it was the only job they had available, and it was in regulatory affairs. This was the start of my career in healthcare."

Not what she had gone to school for. But to Carol’s surprise, she loved it, and loved working in the healthcare space, too. Over time, she branched out: compliance, process excellence, manufacturing, quality and more.

"I just loved the dynamics of supply chain," she recalled. "I loved being close to the product, and being close to the customers and the patients that we served."

What started as an opportunistic job blossomed into an exciting and fulfilling career.

Thirty years on, the luster is still there for Carol—in fact, her achievements recently earned her a Women in Supply Chain Award (alongside her colleague Kathy Wengel).

“Quality is a function that truly goes end to end at Johnson & Johnson,” she said. “I'm so passionate about being a hands-on leader who supports teams spanning the true lifecycle of our products, from R&D to manufacturing, distribution and commercialization.”

Interestingly, "hands on" describes the kind of impact that Carol's making in a more literal sense as well.

"I recently had to have some stitches here on my back," she said, "and when they pulled those Ethicon stitches out”—Ethicon is part of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies—”I was very proud to say, 'My team participated in the manufacture of those!'"



Women's Representation in Supply Chain Roles

Johnson & Johnson has been championing women in the workplace for more than 130 years—in fact, eight of our first 14 J&J employees were women at the time of the company’s founding. Unfortunately, however, women are still underrepresented in the supply chain workforce at large.

Research backs this up: As of 2021, for example, women made up just 41 percent of the global supply chain workforce, an improvement of only two percent from the year before. And if you zoom in on the executive level, even those modest gains start to slip away. For instance, during that same period, the percentage of supply chain executive leadership roles held by women actually declined.

In that context, Johnson & Johnson remains very much an outlier. "I'm extremely proud to say that we're pretty much 50/50 in terms of gender representation within the quality and compliance functions globally," Carol observed.

At the same time, she and her colleagues recognize that these gains have been hard won, and they continue to fight to bring more women into the field.

She described one example of that: "We're cross-pollinating people in manufacturing roles with people in quality roles, because the best quality or compliance person is someone who understands how to manufacture the product, and the best manufacturing person is someone who understands quality and compliance."

Meanwhile, for any young woman contemplating a career in supply chain, Carol had this to say: "I believe supply chain is built for women. Women know how to multitask. We're used to having to fire-fight, whether that means dealing with your kids, balancing work/life priorities, whatever. And if you're anything like me—if you get bored easily by repetitive tasks, if you gain energy by constantly tackling new challenges, if you want to see tangible outcomes result from your efforts—then this is the field for you."



Join Our Supply Chain Team Today

Ready to team up with Carol, Kathy and countless other women managing our global supply chain at Johnson & Johnson? To make a real-world impact in an inclusive environment? To constantly take on new challenges while always being challenged to grow?

If so, check out all of the supply chain roles we're hiring for at Johnson & Johnson.

In the interim, you should sign up for our global talent community, too. It's an easy way to stay in touch, learn more about our culture at Johnson & Johnson and even get updates about jobs that might interest you in the future.

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