How to get started
Contact our University Specialist:
Eric Schwieterman
eric.schwieterman@topcoder.com
Try out TopCrowd, no obligation and 30day free trial.
Key Features and Benefits of TopCrowd
You want your students to be successful. TopCrowd opens doors, giving them more resources, real-world experience, and unmatched opportunities for growth.
- Effortless Setup and Student Engagement: Onboarding TopCrowd for your institution is easy and takes just a few minutes. Invite students and other users by email or by sharing a link. Students gain immediate access to a diverse range of challenges that propel their professional growth.
- Real-World Skill Development: TopCrowd offers a dynamic challenge model that appeals to students’ penchant for competition. Challenges represent real-world work types including software development, ideation, data analytics, security-focused projects, user experience design, automation, and quality assurance. Through challenges, students hone their skills and practice innovative problem-solving.
- Career Confidence and Enhanced Reputation: As students submit their solutions, they build confidence and earn valuable recognition for their achievements. Top performers climb the leaderboards, showcasing their talents to potential employers and standing out in a competitive job market.
- Strategic Partnership Opportunities: TopCrowd’s distinctive partnership feature enables universities to forge strategic partnerships with businesses and organizations in their community. Partners can launch challenges on the platform, giving students the chance to demonstrate their skills, innovate, solve industry-specific problems, and exhibit their talent. It’s a win-win: students gain valuable insights into the professional world and enhance their career prospects, while businesses strengthen their talent pipeline and tap the intellect and ideas of bright young minds.
TopCrowd is a powerful tool for university career services to equip students with the skills, experience, and recognition needed to succeed professionally.
Key Features and Benefits of TopCrowd
- Effortless Setup and User Engagement: Onboarding TopCrowd for your institution is a breeze, taking just a few minutes. Inviting your students and other users is a swift and straightforward process. You can extend invitations or generate a shareable link for your users. Once they’ve signed up, they’ll gain immediate access to a variety of challenges.
- Real World Work Types: Students can tackle real-world problems through our challenge model, which includes software development, ideation, data analytics, security focused topics, designing user experiences, automation, quality assurance and more. These challenges empower innovation and encourage creative problem-solving.
- Competition and Recognition: As students submit solutions, they are not only competing but also gaining valuable recognition and building essential skills. Top performers rise to the top of leaderboards, showcasing their talents to potential employers.
- Partnership Opportunities: TopCrowd’s unique feature allows universities to forge strategic partnerships with businesses. Business partners can launch challenges to the university, where students can showcase their stills to innovate, solve problems and showcase their talent. This collaboration empowers students to apply their skills to industry-specific challenges and gain insights into the professional world.
The Power of University-Business Partnerships
Partnerships between universities and businesses are indispensable for the development and future of your students. These partnerships serve as a bridge between the academic realm and the ever-evolving demands of the job market. TopCrowd recognizes that by joining forces, universities and businesses can:
- Foster Student Skill Development: Businesses gain access to a pool of motivated and talented students who can provide fresh perspectives and solutions to real challenges. Universities, in turn, can tailor their educational programs to meet the needs of industry partners.
- Showcase Student Talents: Through TopCrowd challenges, universities have a platform to showcase the skills and achievements of their students to businesses. This visibility is invaluable for students seeking internships, job opportunities, and mentorship.
- Fuel Innovation and Collaboration: Collaborative efforts between universities and businesses on TopCrowd stimulate innovation, creating a win-win situation for all stakeholders. Students gain practical experience, and businesses benefit from their ingenuity.
Using TopCrowd gives your institution a competitive advantage in the hyper-competitive worlds of higher education and talent recruiting.. Whether you’re a university eager to enhance student skill development or a business seeking emerging talent, together, we can shape the future of education and workforce readiness.
How TopCrowd Works
TopCrowd is designed to maximize user engagement and collaboration between your university, your students and business partners.
- Register Users: Users, which include students, faculty members, and business partners, register and create profiles on the TopCrowd platform.
- Create Challenges: Universities and organizations can launch challenges ranging from software development tasks to design projects. Launching a challenge only takes a few minutes.
- Users Compete: Students and other participants join challenges that align with their skills and interests, and submit solutions within the designated timeframe.
- Review and Scoring: Submitted solutions are meticulously reviewed and assigned scores by the challenge creator and/or a panel of assessors. This process ensures a fair and comprehensive evaluation of the submissions.
- Announce Results: After the review and scoring process is complete, the results of the challenge are announced, recognizing the top performers and showcasing their achievements to the community.
Steps to Forge Business Partnerships
Establishing a partnership is swift and seamless.
Start the Conversation: Reach out to your business partner contacts and introduce them to our exceptional platform, TopCrowd. Emphasize how it can help them get work done while enriching students’ real-world experiences.
Invite Your Partner to Join TopCrowd: If your business partner has not yet registered on TopCrowd, now is the time! Encourage them to visit TopCrowd.net and complete their organization’s registration. Once they’re enrolled, we can proceed with setting up the partnership.
Customize the Experience: Your dedicated sales executive or customer success manager is at your service to support you in establishing the partnership. Inform us whether you would like your partner to initiate challenges for your organization, if you intend to launch challenges for your partner, or any other specific preferences you have.
Unleash Collaboration and Learning: Once the partnership is set up, launching a challenge for your new partner is exceptionally easy. When a new challenge is crafted, the challenge creator can designate the partner as the challenge audience, which makes the challenge accessible to users within the partner organization!
Enhancing Your Experience with TopCrowd
Build a limitless university with TopCrowd.
- Business Partnerships: TopCrowd simplifies the process of forging partnerships between universities and businesses, enabling seamless collaboration on challenges that enrich students’ real-world experiences.
- Showcasing Potential: These partnerships provide a stage for students to showcase their talents and innovations, opening doors to internships, mentorships, and career opportunities.
- Skill Development: By actively participating in these challenges, students acquire practical skills and valuable experience, greatly enhancing their employability.
- Career Opportunities: Exceptional performers within these challenges can catch the eye of potential employers, leading to exciting prospects such as internships, job offers, or fruitful collaborations.
- Recognition and Rewards: Students are duly recognized for their outstanding achievements, and they can be rewarded with prizes tailored to your institution’s recognition preferences, or any arrangements you make with your business partner.
- Curriculum Integration: Effortlessly incorporate challenges into relevant courses or programs, elevating the educational experience and enhancing skill development within your curriculum.
- Strengthening Industry Ties: By joining hands with businesses, universities strengthen their industry connections, ensuring that their educational programs remain aligned with real-world demands.
How to start
- Sign-up for TopCrowd today: Visit TopCrowd.net and enter your educational email address and complete the simple steps to register your organization.
- Invite Users: After you have signed up and registered your organization, you can invite as many users as you want. You can invite by email, or you can generate an invitation link to share.
- Create a Challenge: After inviting your users, get them started and familiar with competing in their first challenge. We recommend creating a challenge which will entice users to participate in the platform. Feel free to use any of our existing templates, or leverage our AI-powered writing assistant to craft a great challenge..
- Talk to your Partners: The best way to get your partners to use TopCrowd starts with a conversation! We recommend setting up a 20 minute chat with your business partners, telling them about TopCrowd, the value and the ease of use. Have them sign-up for TopCrowd, and then you can create your first partner challenge.
Together, we can drive innovation, inspire creativity, and bridge the gap between education and industry, ultimately shaping tomorrow’s leaders who will solve the challenges of the future. The TopCrowd platform stands ready to be your partner in realizing this vision. Let’s embark on this exciting adventure together!