Bhaskar Raghunathan of Datasee.AI – Climate Recruiter Interview – Clidemy Careers

Clidemy Careers is a new section at Clidemy where we post inputs and insights on career opportunities opening up in the fast growing climate action sector.

The Climate Recruiter Interview is one avenue through which we provide insights. In this series, we interact with startup founders, senior management and recruiters from climate tech firms to gain an understanding of the skills they are looking for and perspectives on how professionals from different sectors can transition to a climate tech career.

We are pleased to present the Climate Career Recruiter Interview with  Bhaskar Raghunathan , Co-Founder and CEO at Datasee.AI a leading rooftop solar & distributed solar power solutions provider for residential, commercial & industrial segments.

Datasee.AI was started to serve one purpose – make the power of big data and artificial intelligence easily accessible for every business at every stage of their operational cycle. With their image analytics platform, businesses can digitize their assets with a simple pane for all teams, avoid operational and organizational silos, mitigate risks, and increase profitability. While predominantly used by players in the renewable energy and farming sectors, their team is working to expand capabilities across multiple industries. Datasee.AI uses cutting-edge technology to minimize human errors.

Team Clidemy thanks Sudarsan Krishnan and Nithish Sairam for their insights.

CURRENT ROLES AND SKILLS

What types of climate technology or climate-related career opportunities are available at your firm?

We are looking for people who are passionate about solar PV, industry scale solar PV tech.
Probably how power requirements from a large nation, from a country’s perspective is being met out by large scale developers and how can they contribute to clean energy generation. Those are our focus areas of work and how software and data can help those developers and those power individual power producers are doing. So large scale energy developers can be helped with better asset management techniques with better understanding of how large scale power generation is happening, so that’s the area that we are working on.

We’re looking for electrical engineers who understand and have the subject matter expertise of solar PV. Who know basics of I would say fundamental electrical CAD design and understanding how large scale solar PV plants are built.

We also look for data analysts and data specialists. So that’s the key requirement of probably career opportunities in our organization.

What are the key skill sets you look for in the top three roles?

Key skill sets that we look are, the ability to do fundamental problem solving from a electrical engineering and math perspective.

We also look at large volumes of data that would be utilized and trying to decipher insights and inferences.

We look for a bunch of civil engineers, geoinformaticians who have a good understanding of geography and core competency who would probably be involved in Geometry, Math and Data analysis

What types of training and skill development do you provide for professionals in your firm?

We provide primarily analysis on geospatial data. That’s a fundamental training that we provide. We also provide them training on how to handle basics of GIS through Google Earth and satellite image data.

The freedom to explore and speak to multiple teams within the organization to understand how information can be utilized to better their own profile. Basically, somebody from a completely different engineering background, say, for example, a mechanical engineer or a production engineer would be able to handle any of the large scale image data that we get in because we get large volumes of drone image data, which is completely unstructured. But one will have to do a lot of statistical analysis to understand how the data is being crunched into something more meaningful and where the data is flowing into and how the workflow is. So skill development happens across functionalities inside the organization.

CLIMATE AS CAREER OPTION

Why do you think highly skilled professionals should choose climate technology as their career option?

This is more from a perspective of this is long term sustainability as a solution, right? what we are building is more towards a better future for everybody. And we are the support systems that is enabling better greener assets to kind of have a longevity. And that’s where we come in.

We act as the spine for all these large scale assets and without the spine, the entire functionality is disrupted. So basically the need for highly skilled professionals is much longer because you see longevity in the entire career because all the assets that we monitor run for at least the next 25 years to 30 years. Now we would want to kind of expand this horizontal to much longer. And for that industry needs a lot of highly skilled professionals who can sustain over a much longer term rather than switching between multiple organizations just for the want of monetary benefits, but more towards how to create impact through a clean energy initiative.

How can professionals with fundamental skills (e.g., electrical engineers, biochemistry professionals, excellent marketing professionals, etc.) but no experience in the climate tech field you are operating in transition into climate tech?

This involves subject matter expertise, right? So you have to learn what the need for this particular industry is.

Electrical engineers who have a fundamental understanding of whatever they have studied, in theory, they will have to do a lot of fieldwork. Basically, when they say fieldwork, join smaller organizations, startups like us, to understand and do a lot of soul searching is what I would say.

What’s the impact that we guys are creating? How it can probably or potentially impact our customers? What is that? That they would need per se, so they can kind of realign and refocus from their core skill set to align themselves with what the market or the industry wants. Which means that it involves a lot of research, market research, field work, speaking to a lot of customers, and join young organizations because that’s where you get a lot of scope to kind of explore and speak to multiple people from multiple backgrounds. And then one would be able to better kind off up date their skills.

How can companies in the climate tech domain attract top-notch talents who are currently are more interested in working in high growth, high paying careers such as finance & infotech?

So this is a to be very honest, We are also trying to kind of grab around or probably think about how can we attract top notch talents. Climate technology, in my opinion, is more about an effective solution or perhaps someone who wants to have an impact on society. I think they need to have that innate thought process towards helping the world to be a better place.

That is one fundamental requirement. When any company looks for somebody who we are recruiting for the climatic space. And it is right now it is also equally rewarding financially, but it is definitely not as high as finance but certain climatic domain job profiles and opportunities are equally kind of well paid as compared to a FinTech.

Industry should concentrate on marketing and possibly helping people identify more meaningful careers and how they can help create a more sustainable and better society, in my opinion.

Apart from data, very few other businesses in this industry are now carrying out that activity.

Most climate tech jobs appear to be engineering oriented. What types of non-engineering career options are opening up in climate technology?

I think a lot of marketing is required even at climate tech companies so we at datasee, specifically look for the same. I think that is something that there is a lot of scope and there is a lot of opportunities open there and software and tech products that align themselves with clean energy solutions need a lot of marketing, need a lot of hand holding to kind of take it to consumers. So there’s a lot of marketing help that’s needed.

We are trying to get x who don’t have engineering backgrounds, but have good understanding of how the energy industry is actually orienting itself, rather than the good old oil and gas based energy to kind of move towards clean energy per se. If that understanding is well driven with some of the non engineering graduates, we are looking for those people as well to absorb into our company.

CAREER GROWTH IN CLIMATE TECH

Are salaries and incentives in the climate tech sector as good as the conventional engineering & industrial sectors?

In fact, much better salaries and incentives in compared to conventional engineering and industries. This is much, much better and much more rewarding, I would say, and quicker, because the, the solution and the pace at which the entire market is growing, and the pace at which the entire industry is growing.

The ladder towards quicker money making from an employee or from a job opportunity perspective is significantly high when compared to the traditional industries. And you being able to or any person being able to kind of switch between multiple roles as long as the value addition is coming along, across divisions need not be specifically operations or engineering or finance or procurement. As long as the end user business case can be well understood, switch between multiple departments inside an organization is fairly quick, because the use case is fairly well defined and you’d be able to jump through all the hoops that are being that are being thrown at you and be, I mean come out successful in negotiating a larger pay scale as well.

Can professionals expect career growth in climate tech that are similar to those in other attractive career domains – finance, tech, analytics etc.?

Yes, in fact, it is much, much larger when compared to finance or tech. I mean, this is again, we are also a tech company, but in climate tech per se, the scope for growth and for a longer career option is much larger because I feel this is one of the very underutilized domains. When I say underutilized, the usage of technology for better climate risk assessments and management of sustainable energy assets in itself is very, very underutilized. Say, for example, we come from a geospatial background and the need for geospatial understanding of large scale renewable energy assets is very, very high. But we don’t find any talent at all. It’s very difficult to identify, To give you a picture, the number of universities in India offering geoinformatics as courses is hardly five or six. So in a year, we hardly get to look into maybe 3000, 4000 candidates as compared to against a bunch of IT or CS grads that are coming out. It will run into lakhs and we’ll run into maximum, say, three to 5000, not more than that, max. So that’s two less a number. So it’s one, it’s a comparison between a pin to a ship, right? That’s the volume.

Now, this technology adoption of how large scale data, image data, satellite data, usage of ML, DL techniques and AI techniques for data handling in climate energy or probably in clean energy space is very, very minimal. That foray has not happened to a very great extent. So that scope is significantly larger. People are still looking at AI and data from e-commerce or from a fintech perspective. From a climate perspective, the volume of data is at least 100x larger than any fintech or edtech can even think of. So that volume is not at all understood by the current engineering or probably any of the analysts per se.

So, and the problems are much, much larger. So that is a definitive area of scope. And that I feel has just started growing. I mean, not even started growing, it’s just started, people have started understanding this. So for it to reach to a stage where people start absorbing this and then utilizing this as part of their day to day workflow, will take at least two to three years time and the career is going to be there for the next 30 years at least. So a significant career impacting growth is definitely possible in climate tech. In fact, it will overtake any of your fintech or your edtech by a very large measure in probably by the end of 2030. That’s what I feel because the volume is very, very large. Some industries have not even thought about how to handle this volume of data.