Chitharthan Manimaran of Illumine-i – Climate Professional Interview – Clidemy Careers
Clidemy Careers is a new section at Clidemy where we inputs and insights on career opportunities opening up in the fast growing climate action sector.
The Climate Professional Interview is one avenue through which we provide the insight. In this, we interact with professionals working in the climate action domain to get answers to questions that will be of value to many others who are seeking a career in climate.
We are pleased to present this Climate Career Professional Interview with Chitharthan Manimaran, Customer Experience at Illumine-i, the ultimate clubhouse of sustainable solutions!
Since 2015, they have continued to extend power engineering services, with a special focus on residential, commercial, and utility-scale solar PV and energy storage systems. By 2019, they ventured into construction engineering, offering AS MEPF Modelling, Scan to BIM, City Modelling, VR-AR-MR and Walkthrough animation support. As they keep diversifying, they are experiencing rapid growth, and their geek tribe has expanded into a network of Licensed Professional Engineers, Graduate Engineers, Architects, Technology Enthusiasts, and Thought Leaders (or SMEs).
Team Clidemy thanks Chitharthan for his insights.
Tell us a bit about your educational background
I have a Bachelors in Energy & Environmental Engineering (2013-17) from TNAU, Coimbatore.
PGDM in Data Science (2020-21) from Great Lakes.
What is your current role?
Manager – Customer Experience (Business Intelligence)
What are the different types of climate roles you have done so far?
Not technically “climate roles”, but these are all the roles I have held at Illuminei.
Started my career as a Market Research Analyst for the Renewable Power Engineering market in the USA in Nov 2019. Took charge of handling all Market Acquisition activities for the Digital Construction, Building Information Modeling & Green Building markets in the USA and Canada.Worked in company’s Merger & Acquisition exercises. Worked in building enterprise CRM for different business units and acted as a Data Analytics resource between stakeholders and the CRM. Transitioned into a CX Manager handling the company’s customers, and built a team of 20 Project Engineers.
How does a typical week in your work look?
Arranged in order of the share of time spent.
- Client and vendor meetings: Being the client-facing group, my team members engage with clients for project requests, ongoing project reviews, escalations, periodic (weekly/monthly) reviews, and service upsells. I take part in these meetings if my support is needed.
- Internal stakeholder meetings: With the operations team, market acquisition team, and other support teams.
- Interviews for new hires.
- Affiliation and other partnership discussions: Adding new vendors and affiliate industry partners for new markets.
- Team One-on-Ones : Discussion of progress in performance KPIs, for the week/month/quarter.
- Leadership Meetings: Meetings with the Directors and Managers.
- Sales Discussions: Being part of sales conversations/demos with prospective leads, as an SME.
What are the components of your work that excite you the most?
- Being the ‘A-Team’: The space we operate in is very robust and fast-growing. As a pioneer consulting engineering firm in this sector, we need to upskill ourselves with new technologies and methods at frequent intervals. I love leading the team which has the best engineering expertise in the industry and can add value to customers by solving or simplifying problems
- Customer Excitement: In simple terms, surprising our customers. Delivering at least a little better than what we promise. Connecting with the customers personally, and making sure they feel confident about Illuminei in good & bad times requires a great attitude. My team and I love always maintaining that promising attitude, as a result of which when our contacts move out of our customer companies, they take us along to their new companies as partners.
What types of skills are specifically required in your type of role?
- Data Analysis
- Team & Task Management
- Critical Thinking & Decision Making
- Active Listening & Empathy
- Skills Management
- Communication, Drafting & Reviewing Contracts
- Interviewing
- Negotiation & Conflict Resolution
What types of educational background would roles such as yours require?
- Engineering in any non-IT stream (can be assumed as a mandatory requisite).
- Additional courses in data intelligence, project management or business analytics are helpful.
- Engineers with an interest in, or exposure to sustainable tech are more preferred.
What would your suggestions be for students or professionals keen to have careers such as yours?
- Choose to learn something relevant to the climate-tech industry, on top of your current education or role. For e.g., an MBA Marketing grad choosing to learn more about fuel cells, energy storage, or hydrogen fuel tech can ace an interview easily.
- Opt for internships, internships can help freshers in experimenting in different departments before finding their true north.
What are your suggestions for professionals from sectors unrelated to climate tech to get a foothold in your
sector?
Professionals from other core industries have a great value. Those with good mettle can draw parallels and adapt to this space of sustainable tech. They can bring in process or product ideas from their industries, say, Manufacturing or Automobile, which can be something that was never thought of in Solar. The only advice to them to excel is to cross-learn and help solve problems in this space
What are your perspectives on the future business trends and career opportunities in your sector?
Climate tech offers a range of career opportunities for professionals with different backgrounds, such as engineering, data,science, entrepreneurship, policy, finance, and education.
To list a top-five in my perspective, here are a few key industry segments which are promising.
- Distributed Energy Generation & Storage
- Green Buildings
- Climate Policy
- EV Transportation
- Waste Management.
Energy Generation and Storage is still in its log phase of growth. There is no exaggeration in the number of jobs this space is going to open up for the next 10 years. Governments are pushing all the above spaces through policy decisions, and it is accelerating the rate of growth significantly. This trend is definitely not going to be short-lived with the increase in climate awareness and demand for climate-resilient technologies. Young professionals have a great scope of riding the wave. Illuminei
hires young talent from multiple backgrounds frequently, and for a 300-employee company, our mean age is under 23.
What are your future aspirations in your climate tech career?
Two areas I aspire to work on, in the next 1-2 years.
- Creating a connected experience for the Customers-EPCs-Investors in this space which can expedite implementation.
- Building impactful products and taking it to the communities which are in need of climate-resilient technologies.
What other interesting career roles are opening up in your domain?
Climate policy and carbon finance are two areas where there are excellent new developments happening right now after the governments have framed new structures for sustainability investments. Professionals with interest or expertise in policy review and reporting have opportunities as ESG Analysts, Corporate Sustainability Engineers, Sustainability Managers, Analysts working in EPR, IMDS, SFDR, BRSR etc
Have there been some really satisfying events or moments in your career?
Yes. Customers going out of partnership due to some reason, come back to us after some time missing the experience.
There is this Project Manager who was working in a client company earlier, moved to a different company. He vouched for us so much so that the new company shifted from their current vendors to us in no time. It was a moment of joy winning that account with no extra efforts, by just doing our job right.
As a personal moment, it was the season when we had unexpected spike in volume of projects, but not enough internal teams to handle those requests. We had a very short timeline to hire-train-deploy resources, and we were toiling hard to get through that phase. We successfully managed to sail without any damage, and it is always a memorable phase in my career
If you were to start with your college education all over again, what changes would you have made?
No changes with the stream I chose to study, but I would have explored more in the application-side of all the knowledge we gained. This is a problem with all the colleges, that students don’t get enough exposure to industry-relevant tech and practices.
Illuminei is currently trying to bridge that gap by directly connecting with students and attract good talent. It’s a perfect win-win for that we have excellent inflow of interns coming in every year who get converted into full-time employees.
What are your other interests and hobbies?
- Books, Food and Dogs.
- I love traveling to different parts of the country and connecting with different cultures
