A Career Hiding in Plain Sight
Walk through any commercial district in Chattogram or Dhaka and you will pass showrooms for Hyundai, Toyota, Honda, and a growing roster of Chinese automotive brands rapidly capturing the Bangladeshi market. Bangladesh’s automobile sector is growing: the country imported over 25,000 vehicles in fiscal year 2022–23, and with rising middle-class incomes and expanding credit access, that number is expected to climb. Yet ask most Bangladeshi university graduates about a career in automobile sales and you are likely to get a blank stare.
The industry is largely invisible as a career destination — not because the jobs don’t exist, but because nobody has presented them compellingly to young people who are searching for opportunity in more visible sectors.
The Workshop: Expertise From Canada to Chattogram
On Monday, 16 February 2026, IGMIS Foundation hosted an Automobile Sales Training workshop at its premises in Mehedibagh, Chattogram, under the banner ‘Exploring Career Opportunities in Emerging and Undiscovered Industries.’ The session was led by Abu Sufi MA Rahman Khan — a B.Com, MBA, and GD OMVIC holder from Georgian College, Ontario, Canada — whose career has included roles as a Senior Product Advisor, Finance-Leasing Consultant, and Professional Sales Team Trainer at Don Valley North Hyundai (Weins Canada), one of Canada’s largest Hyundai dealerships.
Mr. Khan is also a Certified Automotive Law, Ethics and Sales Professional certified by the Ontario Motor Vehicle Industry Council (OMVIC) in Toronto — a credential that reflects not just sales technique but a deep understanding of the legal and ethical frameworks that govern professional automotive sales in one of the world’s most regulated markets.
Registration was open to all, with a modest fee of Tk 350 — a price point designed to keep the workshop accessible to young people early in their careers, consistent with the IGMIS Foundation’s philosophy of low-barrier access to professional development.
What Participants Gained
The workshop covered the fundamentals of professional automotive sales — from product knowledge and customer engagement to financing, leasing consultation, and the legal ethics that underpin long-term career credibility. Crucially, it offered Bangladeshi participants a window into global best practices: how the automotive sales profession is structured, valued, and remunerated in markets like Canada, and what skills young Bangladeshis would need to compete in an increasingly internationalised industry.
Why This Matters for Bangladesh’s Youth
With roughly 40% of Bangladesh’s youth classified as NEET — not in education, employment, or training — and with the graduate unemployment crisis deepening, the country urgently needs to diversify the range of career pathways young people can envision for themselves. Programmes like this automobile sales workshop do exactly that. They expand the imagination of what a career can look like, present a viable and potentially lucrative industry in concrete terms, and connect participants to expertise and credentialing frameworks they would not otherwise encounter in Chattogram.
The IGMIS Foundation’s willingness to invest in sessions like this — even for industries that lie outside conventional graduate career tracks — is a marker of genuine commitment to youth employability, not just institutional box-ticking.
