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When you rise, some people will try to pull you down. Ignore them. Do not argue, keep your hands clean, and let your work speak for itself. Knowledge is only powerful when it is shared.
"Her father once told her that an internal audit job was no place for a woman. Fourteen years later, Nausheen Ahmed sits on the global body that writes the exam every internal auditor in the world must pass — the first person from Bangladesh ever to hold that seat."
Nausheen Ahmed built a career in a field that barely existed as a career path in Bangladesh when she entered it. Internal audit, she likes to say, was a green field then — unglamorous, largely male, and thin on local expertise. Fourteen years on, she is Head of Internal Audit and Compliance at BRAC University, a sitting member of the global committee that writes the Certified Internal Auditor exam, and the founder of SheenSight, an advisory practice now serving clients across Bangladesh and the Middle East.
Her path to that position was not linear, and she does not pretend otherwise. It ran through a job she was pressured to leave, a government post she was denied under circumstances that verged on fraud, and a five-year gap she had to close by outworking auditors who had never left the profession at all. What she built afterward reads less like recovery than proof of what the detour cost the people who tried to stop her: a Top 15 global leadership honor, a Bangladeshi first on an international standards body, two published guidance papers, and, in 2025, the recognition that made BRAC University the first institution in Bangladesh admitted to the IIA's global Internal Audit Academic Alliance.
She was, by her own account, an unremarkable student for most of her early schooling — more interested in the neighborhood than the classroom, vaguely picturing herself as a teacher one day. Something shifted in class eight, without any obvious cause. What followed was clear: by class nine, she had become the top-ranked girl in her class, and by the time she chose her academic track, she picked business studies over science, an unusual move in a culture that quietly ranks science as the domain of its sharpest students. Her father, unconvinced, had not expected her to earn a Golden A+ on her board exams. She did. It was, by her telling, the first time he began to believe there was more in his daughter than he had planned for. That pattern — low expectation followed by quiet correction — would repeat throughout her twenties.
After finishing her degree in finance, Nausheen turned down the conventional path into banking and took a role in internal audit instead, drawn in by a boss who described the field as wide open in Bangladesh. Her father, a lifelong nine-to-five professional, was furious. The hours were long, the industry was male-dominated, and to him it was simply not appropriate work for a woman. At twenty-three, without the standing to push back, she left the job and agreed to prepare for what her family considered a safer path: a government position.
What happened next tested her more than the audit job ever had. After a hiring process that ran nine months, complete with exams, preparation, and interviews, she was told she had not qualified, despite having passed. Her own investigation, and her family's, turned up something worse: her exam script appeared to have been manipulated to lower her score. When her husband and in-laws threatened to go to the media and pursue legal action, the response from the other side was to threaten to withhold her original academic certificates altogether. She walked away rather than start a career inside an institution that had shown her, before she had even joined it, exactly what it was capable of.
Too much time had passed to simply return to where she started, so she took a role as a business intelligence analyst at Dnet, a social enterprise, and stayed there through the birth of her daughter. It was steady work. It was not, she felt, hers. The pull back to audit came from the person who had first hired her into the field — her former boss at ACI Limited, who told her plainly that she belonged back in her pavilion. This time, her family did not object. They had seen what their objection had already cost her once.
She rejoined ACI Limited in 2018, five years behind where she might have been, and treated the gap as a debt to be paid off quickly. With no Certified Internal Auditor holders yet on her team, and fewer than a handful in the entire country, she decided the designation was worth pursuing anyway. She built her own study network on LinkedIn, which she had opened for the first time that year, connecting with CIA holders abroad who walked her through how to prepare. She passed all three parts of the exam within roughly a year — an outcome her own colleagues had assumed was not realistic on that timeline.
The certification changed the shape of her career. She became a CIA preparatory course facilitator for the IIA Bangladesh chapter, then moved into a broader control and audit role at Marico Bangladesh, then into an international post at ASA International overseeing audit work across four countries in Asia and Africa. In 2020, the Institute of Internal Auditors named her one of fifteen Emerging Leaders worldwide — the moment she describes as the real turning point, the one that took her name outside Bangladesh for the first time.
What followed was a string of firsts. She was accepted onto the IIA's global Exam Development Committee in 2023, reviewing the same certification exam she had once been told was nearly impossible to pass — the first person from Bangladesh ever seated on that committee; in 2026 the IIA renewed her seat for a further term running through 2029. Between 2024 and 2025, IIA flew her to its Lake Mary, Florida headquarters for consecutive years of CIA syllabus revision work, including a Challenge Exam syllabi meeting in May 2025, and to Amsterdam for job task analysis on how the certification itself should evolve. She has since been retained as a subject matter expert on the CIA Challenge Exam syllabus through 2029, and in early 2026 was invited into the IIA's Remote CIA Rapid Content workshop to help write new exam items from Dhaka. In September 2025, two global guidance papers bearing her contributions were published, including one on third party topical requirements — a document she describes, without much exaggeration, as close to scripture for practicing internal auditors.
That same year, BRAC University became the first university in Bangladesh admitted to the IIA's global Internal Audit Academic Alliance, and Nausheen was named Academic Alliance Coordinator between the university and IIA Global — a recognition covered widely across the country's national press. She also carried the same growing visibility onto the international speaking circuit that year.
SheenSight, launched in April 2026, grew out of a gap Nausheen had watched persist for years: plenty of firms sell external audit and general consultancy services, while vanishingly few build their practice specifically around internal audit. Even some of the largest global firms, by her account, fall short of what the profession's own global standards actually require. SheenSight offers advisory work, internal audit function development, risk-based and value-based auditing support, training, and mentoring, publishing its thinking through a weekly LinkedIn newsletter, SheenSight Insights, while its formal website remains in development.
Its first engagement arrived almost by accident: a client in the Middle East, reached through her husband's business contacts, wanted to scale up its internal audit department from nothing. Nausheen and her team built the client's audit excellence framework, tools, and templates from the ground up. The engagement is, by her account, going well, and it has become the template for how she wants SheenSight to grow — deliberately, market by market, rather than all at once.
Middle East, Remote
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Gulshan-1, Dhaka
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Motijheel, Dhaka
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Gulshan-2, Dhaka
BBA, Finance — University of Dhaka
As the elder of two daughters, Nausheen grew up under rules that kept her socially guarded, discouraged from mixing freely with male classmates, and largely absent from the university events where students build the networks that later open doors. She graduated, by her own account, not knowing a single senior she could ask for an introduction or an internship lead. Nobody had explained to her how careers actually get built. She had to work that out alone, by trial and by cost.
That gap is precisely what she now spends her time closing for others. She mentors students, including her nephews and their friends, without hesitation and without billing it as generosity. She knows exactly what it is worth, because she spent years without it.
She is candid that visibility was never the goal, credibility was, and that the two turned out to be the same project. She built hers on two habits: making sure anyone she trained or mentored actually left with something useful, and using LinkedIn deliberately as a record of contribution rather than a place to pass time.
The return has been concrete. At professional conferences in Dhaka, Toronto, and Singapore, including the ACIIA regional meeting where she was honored in 2026, delegates who had never met her have introduced themselves already knowing her name. In one instance, a Bangladeshi colleague at a Singapore conference mentioned where he was from, and contacts from the Middle East immediately asked whether he knew her.
Recognition, she has found, invites its own resistance. As her public profile grew, so did quiet criticism from people uninterested in the years of work behind it. Her response has hardened into a personal rule: do not argue, do not explain yourself to people determined to misread you, and treat the criticism itself as evidence of your own progress. In her words, the people trying to pull you down are, by definition, already behind you.
