By Team ItsGoa
Bodhami is an award-winning ed-tech startup based at Malbhat in Margao. The firm was founded in June 2018 by 3 dynamic individuals – Damodar Pai Patnekar, Ashutosh Shankar, and Aarthy Vassan. The startup looks at the end-to-end journey of the student right from career counselling, learning, and corporate readiness to placement and has platforms to support each of these phases of the journey.
Till date, 35,000+ students have undergone career counselling and learning on Bodhami’s AI platform and more than 1900+ Career Counsellors and Consultants have been certified on Bodhami Platform across more than 250+ cities in India
In a brief conversation with ItsGoa, Mr. Damodar Pai Patnekar, co-founder, Bodhami shared detailed insights about the startup, the services it provides, the major projects that it has undertaken in the state of Goa, future plans and lots more…
Excerpts
What does the word ‘Bodhami’ mean?
Bodhami is a Sanskrit word which is made up of two words ‘bodh’ and ‘ami’. ‘Bodh’ means knowledge and ‘ami’ means I. So, people who want to come and gain or acquire knowledge can visit Bodhami. We always wanted something in Sanskrit so that the adoption of the name is easier and better across geographies and languages. Bodhami is a well-accepted word in both southern and northern Indian languages
Give us details about the various types of services offered by your firm.
Bodhami looks at the end-to-end journey of the student right from career counselling, learning, and corporate readiness to placement and has platforms to support each of these phases of the journey.
These are the platforms which Bodhami has developed so far:
Career Counselling Platform – Career Counseling Certifications, Career Guidance Report, Stream Selection Report, International Study Report, Job Switch Report, Career Library, Stream and College Selection
Recruitment Platform – AI-based Candidate Hiring Test, Candidate Aptitude Report, Corporate Readiness Report, Life Skills Assessments, Skills Assessment Report
Competency Assessment Platform – Employee Learning Report, Life Coaching Discovery Report, Subject Tests, Corporate Readiness Report, Technical Readiness Report, Job Fitment Report, Skill and Learning Report, Job Based Entrance Exams, Training Needs Analysis, Innovation Index Report
Learning Management System (LMS) – Certification Courses, Video Courses, Live Online Courses, Test Series, Assignments, Assessments, Entrance Exams, Subject Tests, Job Specific Exams, Skill Based Courses, Career Counseling Sessions, Life Courses
Scholarship and Grant Management System – Manage scholarships, Automated selection process with proctored tests
Career Counseling is only 5-10% of the initial support which is required for the student. Students would need support or coaching on skill upliftment, readiness for entrance examinations, readiness for corporate jobs, placement support in jobs etc. and learning and scaling during the job. This constitutes to the rest 90-95% of the journey for the student across phases of education and work.
Bodhami looks at this end-to-end journey right from career counselling, skill upliftment and learning, corporate readiness for students and graduates, scholarships and finally placement/recruitment.
With one Bodhami account over 50+ services can be enabled. For this Bodhami has enabled 5 platform access to each educator to support the student. These platforms include career counselling, learning management, scholarships, recruitment and corporate readiness
How does Bodhami guide young students/aspirants in helping them find the right career?
Bodhami psychometric assessment is based on the concept of Holistic 360 degrees of skill assessment and learning. Our psychometric assessments have been created after extensive research and statistical validations by a team of experts who are PHDs, psychologists, neuroscience experts, IITians with AI expertise and HR experts.
We measure students’ unique aptitude, interest and personality which is used to uniquely suggest the desired careers for the student and recommend the learning interventions needed for skill upliftment. There are 14 unique skills, 10 interest parameters and 10 core personality dimensions which assessed as part of our career tests (total of 34 dimensions)
What is unique about the platform is that the recommendation is done based on the data of 10000+ actual career professionals from 19 different career streams. Every time a student or a professional seeking guidance on the most suited career takes the career test, the AI algorithm compares the 34 dimensions for the student with that of actual career professionals and comes up with a career recommendation based on the association algorithm.
Give us a brief profile about yourself and your co-partners.
I (Damodar) am from Margao Goa. I am an MBA Gold medalist from SJIM Bangalore. I have worked in the digital & business consulting area for over 15+ years. I have worked with some of India’s top companies like Wipro Technologies and MetLife India. In my free time, I play professional cricket for a club, mentor students and professionals in their careers and travel with my family.
Ashutosh is from Delhi and is settled in Bangalore. He is an IIT Kharagpur & IIM Calcutta alumnus and AI and analytics expert. He has worked with big names in the IT industry such as Wipro, Infosys and TCS and has over 15+ years of experience in IT. He is fond of spending long hours in meditation, helping the needy, spending good time in nature and having a good spiritual connection.
Aarthy is a technology enthusiast and enterprise-level technology architect with 12 years of IT Experience. She has worked in companies like Wipro and Infosys before. She is settled in Bangalore but is originally from Chennai. She is a voracious reader and loves to read fiction. In her free time, she loves to acquire knowledge on varied topics like language, history, and culture.
When did the three of you first meet each other?
The three of us first met at Wipro Technologies. All of us used to work on client programs or engagements where we used to help clients transform their business processes using technology. We have known each other for close to 8-9 years now and therefore share a great chemistry.
What are the aspects that the three of you bring along?
Each of us come with a very diverse experience which was very much needed as part of the building blocks for Bodhami. To build a scaled platform like Bodhami we needed a blend of Digital Experience, technical expertise and the use of Artificial Intelligence / Analytics to drive the unique assessment models. If you look at our co-founding team, this is exactly where we all helped to get the best of the breed relevant experience and make Bodhami happen. Damodar’s experience of digital consulting helped in drawing the future digital journeys for stakeholders on the platform, Ashutosh helped to fill in the AI and Analytics thought leadership to create unique propositions and Aarthy crafted a very strong technology advance architecture to help the platform scale.
What was the idea that you had in mind while starting this firm?
We realized that most students made poor stream and career selection decisions due to uncertainty and lack of awareness. Students were aware of only 6-7 careers on average when in modern times, 2000+ lucrative careers were on offer. Over 45% of the students were ending up making a wrong career choice with 95% of schools and colleges not having any formal access to career counselling and mentoring. This problem was even more concerning in rural and semi-rural areas compared to metros
As corporate professionals, we often came across professionals who were quite unhappy with their current work and that is mostly attributed to not getting the right career guidance at the right age and stage. This problem was even more evident in young graduates coming from rural or semi-urban backgrounds where the only career options they primarily knew were engineering, medical and govt. jobs.
We also saw the common problems in a large number of young engineering and MBA professionals joining corporates is that they were not quite ready to directly start their professional careers and organizations had to spend months polishing their technical and soft skills to make them ready for the hands-on jobs.
When we look at the numbers, we found that over 95% of students in India don’t even have access to career counselling, mentoring or structured skill upliftment. This is where we really wanted to bring about a change and have an advanced and scaled solution which can reach to the bottom of the pyramid and do upliftment at the ground level. That too with a very reasonable cost (low cost – high impact)
This motivated us to create an end-to-end platform which starts with career counselling and then provides them with mentorship & job readiness programs and ultimately links them to the recruiters in the right areas.
How much funding has your venture received thus far and from whom?
Bodhami is a bootstrapped organization. We are very clear in our vision at Bodhami and we have kept it like that to create a low-cost, high-volume, last-mile impact creation organization, especially keeping in mind the rural/semi-urban and low- and medium-income strata student population in India
Who are your major clients?
Around 95% of our business comes from B2B or Business to Business. 5% of our business is B2C or D2C (Direct to customer).
Since we have varied products, hence the kind of target audience we partner with are also different.
Our Career Counseling and Skill Assessment platforms are used by Schools, Institutions, Trainers, Counsellors, Teachers, NGOs, State Governments, Departments, Life Coaches etc
Our Recruitment Platforms are used by Recruiters, Placement Consultants, Corporates
Our Scholarship Platforms are used by NGOs and Corporates
Our Learning Platforms are used by NGOs, Schools, Institutions, Trainers etc.
Some of our big clients include – Department of Education (Government of Goa), Care India Foundation (NGO – Mumbai), SBA Emerging Youth Scholarship and Mentorship Scheme (sbahp.org) in Himachal Pradesh, Asha Society (Telangana), Keystone (Gujarat), Teenr (Chennai and Bangalore) etc.
Any major projects done by Bodhami in Goa?
Bodhami partnered with the Government of Goa, Education Department to enable a state wise roll-out of the career aptitude testing and career counselling program across the state of Goa. Bodhami trained 700+ teachers across Goa on career counselling frameworks, methodology and usage of the AI-powered platform for administering career tests, generating career reports and conducting career counselling sessions.
More than 18k students of class 10th and 12th across 250+ schools and 12 talukas in the state answered aptitude tests and were imparted career guidance along with personalized career reports. This was the first time such an initiative at this scale was driven under the vision of Chief Minister, honourable Dr. Pramod Sawant.
Post completion of the program, Bodhami also presented detailed analytics on district, taluka & school levels to the government to identify specific skill gaps & ideate ways to design learning programs across these skill gaps.
What sort of support did Bodhami offer in innovation and entrepreneurship through structured assessments and training?
Bodhami partnered with the Goa State Innovation Council (GSInC) and for the first time in the state of Goa launched an initiative called the Innovation Test. The test measures the innovation quotient which will include 9 core innovation dimensions – namely Creative, Inventiveness, Passion, Learning, Motivation, Adapting, Risk Taking, Interpersonal, Problem-solving, Technology Acumen and Curiosity.
The Innovation test was launched by the Chairman of the Goa State Innovation Council, Shri Jose Manuel Noronha in collaboration with Bodhami.
Every applicant or student gets a 15 Pager personalized innovation report which will highlight strengths, weaknesses, improvement areas, innovation dimensions and learning courses to drive innovation and entrepreneurship for the applicant.
The innovation test can be taken by Students, Young Innovators, Entrepreneurs, Faculty and Professionals. The Innovation test will help to drive a culture of innovation among the students and youth. It will encourage entrepreneurship and innovation by guiding them with the right free courses around innovation and self-entrepreneurship. The innovation test will help to scientifically measure and improve Innovation Quotient and core competencies in innovation. This initiative will help to drive innovation culture and avenues across the state of Goa
The innovation test can be simply taken by clicking on the innovation test link on www.gsic.in. The applicants can directly download the innovation report which also contains learning recommendations. The applicants can take the learning courses to improve their innovation score.
Any awards that your firm has been felicitated with?
Bodhami was the first startup from Goa to have ever won a National Award to date for the phenomenal work they have done in the field of rural enablement, career guidance and skill assessment. Bodhami received a cash prize and a yearlong mentorship from StartUp India as a winner of the award. A few months later, Bodhami was covered under the “StartUp Champions” program by DD in Hindi and English across 21 national channels and All India Radio.
Bodhami’s founder – Damodar Pai Patnekar has been awarded the eminent Goans achievers award – which is an award given to only 2 Goans from the Government of Goa as part of 60 years of Liberation of Goa.
Bodhami was selected to be one of the chosen start-ups at the International SCO Startup showcase event which hosted 8 Nations.
Bodhami’s platform is the only career counselling platform in India which is assessed and validated by the Quality Council of India (QCI).
What are the major challenges that you face while running your firm?
Getting the right people to work with us has been a major challenge which we have faced ever since we started off. We looked at over 3000+ profiles to select the right set of 10 resources we wanted to onboard on the team. All of us have worked together like one big family right from day one.
In this fast-moving economy when much bigger MNCs are seeing an attrition rate as high as 28%, quarter on quarter, Bodhami has hardly seen an attrition rate in the last four years. Thanks to the team which has always shared and believed in the vision of bringing about a change at the grassroots level
Keeping costs under control is another challenge that we have faced while running this firm. We draw a parallel from WhatsApp which was launched and managed by a team of only 8 across the world. We looked at the five-year horizon of how the business model and platform should shape up and what all journeys and products should be launched on the platform year-on-year. We also looked at which technologies would help us automate this entire process. This is because we knew that if you have to reach scale then automation is the only way possible to keep the cost under control. Therefore, the choice of cloud and Artificial intelligence technologies for automated flow and decision-making is what is planned. As we have envisioned, most of our journeys are now automated and we have a team of 10 members who manage the platform end-to-end across all the products. Automation is the way forward.
What are your future plans?
Currently, we have 1,600+ professionals including educators, counsellors, psychologists and HR professionals who have gone through detailed training. Till date, 35,000+ students have undergone career counselling and learning on Bodhami’s AI platform. We aim to create 1 Lac+ micro-entrepreneurs and impact the lives of 50L+ students through them in the next 5 years.
Finally, any message or words of advice that you would like to share with our readers?
Bodhami truly believes that every child is unique and has potential. It’s very important to identify the right skills, interests and personality of the child and find out where the child would shine. Just as we can’t judge a fish by how fast it can climb a tree or an elephant by how high it can jump, similarly, we can’t just judge each child by how many marks they get or whether they can get into Science, Engineering or Medicine or Not.
Each child once he gets the right career path would eventually be able to become a skill full and happy individual. Hence career counselling from the early age of 8th standard should be a mandatory birthright of each student to make the right choices.
