Mengying Liu describes leaving Deutsche Bank with a phrase that translates from Chinese roughly as a cold resignation: no backup plan, no bridge, just out. By that point she had, by her own account, landed an internship at Intel during her undergraduate years in the UK, graduated, and gone on to join one of the major global investment banks. The credentials were solid. She left anyway.
What she walked toward was a company she had been thinking about longer than she let on. Top Offer Academy, registered in London in October 2021, was Liu’s answer to a problem she had watched accumulate around her during her own time as an international student: what happens when someone arrives in a professional environment where their degree is recognized but almost nothing else is.
There was no shortage of career coaching aimed at international students by the time Liu started building. What was missing, in her view, was a coherent process. One that started earlier than most providers started, and stayed with each student longer than the typical engagement allowed.
The process TOA built begins with what Liu calls career positioning. Before any application goes out, each student works through an analysis of their actual strengths and professional interests, arriving at a list of 30 to 50 companies that represent a realistic, well-matched target set. It is, as Liu told a December 2024 education conference in Beijing, the step most people skip.
“The first step looks like the simplest one, but it’s actually the most important,” she said at the conference. “If the first step goes wrong, everything after it goes wrong. Better to spend more time there than rush and get the sequence wrong.”
The curriculum that follows runs across 17 course series, each covering a distinct industry or phase of the search process, from resume and cover letter work through interview preparation. The program has gone through six versions since launch. Mentors are required to have at least five years of experience at a major company, and many hold management positions. Liu has pointed to that as a structural advantage in terms of how they understand the hiring process from the inside.
“They’re often the people sitting on the other side of the interview table,” she noted at the same conference, “so they understand what hiring teams are actually looking for in a way that’s much more current than any generic advice.”
The employer side of that equation is where Davis Kuma works. As Business Partnerships Manager at TOA, Kuma is responsible for building the company’s relationships with the businesses its students aim to join: identifying viable partners, understanding what those companies actually need from early-career candidates, and matching interns with placements that hold up for both sides.
His path to that role ran through a different part of the professional world entirely. Kuma holds a degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Coventry University, by his own account, and worked as a System Engineer at Schneider Electric, where he commissioned SCADA systems for B2B clients in the energy sector. Before joining TOA, he founded Masina, a green micro-mobility venture that, by his account, ran fully electric transit services across five cities and cut more than 1,000 tons of carbon emissions.
That combination of technical training and entrepreneurial experience shapes how he approaches his role. Building employer partnerships is not simply relationship management. It requires understanding what a business needs before it knows how to ask, and then working back from that to determine which candidates and what kind of preparation would actually fit.
The function matters more as the company grows. TOA has expanded, by Liu’s own account at the Beijing conference, from a small founding team to more than 100 full-time employees across global locations. The company’s Xiaohongshu presence, on the platform sometimes called Little Red Book, has gathered more than 30,000 followers by the company’s account; total subscribers across its online channels are reported at more than 100,000. Its registered office is in London’s Canary Wharf district, and its platform operates with AI-enabled functionality.
Liu has been deliberate about how she characterizes that growth. The model she refuses is what she calls the training factory: large cohorts moving through identical material at the same pace, on a schedule that ignores where each student stands when they arrive.
“An offer is something every student gets on their own,” she said. “But behind it is the growth of everyone involved.”
The career coaching sector for international students expanded quickly in the years after TOA launched, and with it a category of providers whose pitch rested on speed. Liu does not argue against ambition. She argues against the assumption that following market trends constitutes a strategy.
“If we’d kept chasing trends from the start, we’d have been eliminated from the market long ago,” she said at the Beijing conference. “We keep going back to the original question: what can we actually do for these students? That’s where everything starts.”
She enrolled in Oxford University’s MBA program while continuing to lead the company, describing herself at the December 2024 event as studying and running TOA at the same time. She noted it as a condition of where the company was at that point in its life, rather than as a particular achievement.
The philosophy she uses for how TOA approaches its clients translates roughly from a Chinese phrase as: serve the people already here well, and those farther away will naturally follow. For a company whose founder walked away from a major bank with no plan and whose partnerships manager came from engineering and green-tech entrepreneurship, it reads as a position built from experience.
