Salesforce Career Conversations #13: Rohit Kumar

Episode 13: Rohit Kumar Salesforce Career Conversation with ROD. Listen to Rohit talk about his career journey, to become one of only a handfull of Salesforce CTAs currently in India. [Below is a transcript for your benefit. Please excuse any typos.] Lee Durrant: Hiya. It's Lee Durrant here. Welcome to another RODcast. I'm joined with Theresa again today. Today we're interviewing Rohit Kumar, who is a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect based out in India. He's one of only five CTAs in India which is quite interesting, I think. We get to chat with him about his career. Hope you can bear with us.   Lee: Welcome to Rohit Kumar. Thanks very much for joining us. How are you?  Rohit Kumar: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. How about you?  Lee: Yes, we're good. Teresa is with me.  Theresa Durrant: Hello.  Rohit: Hi.  Theresa: Good to meet you.  Rohit: Same here.  Theresa: Excellent.  Rohit: Hope you're safe.  Theresa: We're very safe.  Lee: We should say again for people listening in that this is May 2021, so still very much in the middle of COVID, and I totally appreciate, Rohit, where you are it's awful at the moment. For people listening, that's where we are. We're very safe here, but how about you over there, mate? How's it going?  Rohit: I think it's going good. The situation is definitely not good and government is trying its level best to see what best they can do for everyone. We are in total curfew as we speak. I'm very hopeful that the situation would improve in the next couple of weeks. Fingers crossed. Let's see how the upcoming weeks would be.  Lee: Whereabouts are you, Rohit? Whereabouts are you in India?  Rohit: I am in a city called Bangalore. It's in the south of India and is primarily referred to as one of the IT capitals of the world. Most large organisations, product-based companies or any companies into advisory, consulting, are primarily headquartered or will have a bigger branch in Bangalore, India.  Lee: Fantastic. Before we go into the questions about your career and how you got to where you are at the moment, I was reading today that India has got the largest worldwide concentration of Salesforce technical talent, which I didn't know. It made sense, but it's one interesting stat.  Rohit: One of the advantages we've got is that India has one of the largest talent pools and is also one of the largest countries with many Salesforce consultants and developers, so we see a good amount of opportunity within the country. A lot of organisations has invested either in Salesforce as part of their digital transformation journey or an implementation partner based in India. Ample amount of opportunity as well for the talent in India.  Theresa: Fantastic.  Lee: I think we'll start at the beginning of your career then if that's okay and you can talk us through-- I suppose we haven't started the right way here. If you can just introduce yourself in terms of who you are, what you do so that people will know.  Rohit: Yes, definitely.  Lee: Obviously, we'll share your LinkedIn profile for people that want to have a look at it after this but yes, if you introduce yourself.  Rohit: I'll start from where am I today and how did I start.  Theresa: Yes, perfect.  Rohit: Hi, everyone. I'm Rohit. I'm CTO for Venerate Solutions and one of the board members. I'm also one among very few Salesforce Certified Marketing [unintelligible 00:04:08]. From a career perspective, in the early days of my career, I was primarily engaged more into development of India's first nanosatellite. I was primarily writing real-time operating systems and was involved in the hardcore system development. I always had plans.  Having worked in a engagement where you take three to four years to build a product and launch it, I always had a feeling to explore what's there in the IT industry and how do I work on something where I can bring in agility and reduce the time to mar...