Bizmaestros is a yearly business competition organized by Uniliever in order to find out the best of the best amongst the final year university students. The local winners of this competition then get the opportunity to represent their country in the global stage and battle it out amongst all the other winners from different countries.
On the 12th of November 2020, Team Incredibles from IBA Dhaka University, comprising of Marzina Akhter Prottasha, Sadia Hasan and Sajid Asbat Khandaker won the local edition of the competition and secured their places on the global stage where they will represent Bangladesh.
And even though the grand finale took place on a virtual platform for the very first time, the hype of the competition remained indifferent. 6 teams consisting of 18 talented individuals took on the final hurdle of the month long competition to reach for the stars. Team Mudblood from BUP became the 1st runners up while Team Bus-Hawks, also from IBA Dhaka University, grabbed the 2nd runners up position.
The competition consisted of a total of 3 rounds comprising of the 1st round, semi-final round and final round. And throughout these rounds the competitors faced diverse and arduous challenges that brought out the best in them.
In the first round, the participants had to work with 3 of the brands of Uniliever and create a strategy for boosting the sales during the “New Normal”. From a fairly large number of teams only 30 could make it to the Semi-final round of the competition where they had to work with e-commerce and modern trade. And finally, the top 6 were selected for the grand finale of Bizmaestros 2020.
After speaking to the champions what could be understood is that Bizmaestros is one of those competitions that business students start targeting from the very start of their university lives.
“Every IBA student has the dream that one day they will win Bizmaestros. For a long time we have been observing our seniors winning this competition, representing Bangladesh and making our country proud on the global stage”, said Prottasha.
Even though there were problems of not being able to work face to face and to rather resort to online communication, the strategy of the team remained the same.
“We used to come up with multiple solutions to a problem but proceed with only one finally, the one which we thought to be the most feasible”, said Sajid.
How this competition differs from the others is that unlike most of the other competitions Bizmaestros makes their participants take part in field researches.
This gives the competitors a real world experience where they can communicate with their customers and get to know the problems that they are experiencing, be it in the product or the supply chain.
This benefits of this competition isn’t solely limited to representing the country in a global stage but it also gives the winners a massive advantage in the management trainee recruitment process of Uniliever.
According to Sadia, “Bizmaestros is a competition which tests your real life business skills. Aside from the usual self-learning that occurs in competitions like these we learned a lot from the ‘learning sessions ‘that were hosted by Uniliever Bangladesh as well. This competition makes the final year students well prepared for their professional careers, which they will join soon”.