Lessons from the Field: Building Deeper Employer Collaborations with the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation and Mayo Clinic
Last month, the Catalyze Community of Practice convened grantees from across the country to tackle a challenge many have faced: how to deepen employer collaborations, moving beyond one-time job talks and career fairs, to provide learners with more immersive, high-touch engagements like internships.
Catalyze hosted Jennifer Mellor, Chief Innovation Officer at the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation, a Catalyze grantee, Ron Mack, Talent Solutions Specialist at Mayo Clinic, and Michelle Cheang, the Director of Catalyze, to share best practices from ElevateEdAZ’s collaboration with Mayo Clinic. Through this relationship, Mayo Clinic employs 18-20 paid student interns per cohort, offering learners real-world work experience in health care, IT, and operations roles.
Jennifer and Ron surfaced actionable insights to help other practitioners strengthen employer collaborations, including:
Meet employers where they are—start small, and then scale
Leverage trusted intermediaries to reduce friction for both employers and schools
Invest in both learner and employer readiness to create even more effective collaborations
Meet employers where they are—start small, and then scale
“Once you get those employers in the door, and you get them hooked, and you get them seeing the students and having a positive experience, they’re more inclined to actually increase their engagement.”
Early, low-stakes opportunities—such as career talks, site visits, or job shadows—help employers build trust and relationships with learner organizations before committing to longer, deeper engagements like paid internships and apprenticeships.
For example, Ron and his team at Mayo Clinic took part in various work-based learning experiences before launching the paid internship program. During the pilot phase, Mayo Clinic hired seven interns. Through learner and supervisor feedback, they continued to iterate and improve the program, growing it to 18-20 interns per cohort participating for a full year.
These early wins can build momentum. As employers see the value of working with high school students firsthand, their interest naturally deepens.
Leverage trusted intermediaries to reduce friction for both employers and schools
“At ElevateEdAZ, one thing that makes us interesting as an intermediary is that we have the ability to connect Mayo Clinic to multiple school partners, and so they’re not having to go out to our 27 different schools and make those connections.”
Trusted intermediary and backbone organizations like the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation and ElevateEdAZ play a crucial role in connecting employers with learners, and vice versa. Jennifer explained how ElevateEdAZ onboards each employer it works with, aligning expectations for hiring requirements, timelines, and the application process. This allows the organization to streamline the hiring process by serving as a central point of contact for both school districts and employers in the region, sharing work-based learning opportunities with learners who might be a good fit.
Because ElevateEdAZ works with many employers across sectors, its position enables it to share proven practices from one organization to another. For instance, when Mayo Clinic lowered its hiring age for certain roles from 18 to 17 to expand the pool of eligible high school students, ElevateEdAZ highlighted it as an example to encourage other employers to do the same, dispelling a common misperception about hiring requirements.
Invest in both learner and employer readiness to create even more effective collaborations
“Mayo Clinic believes in growing our future workforce from the ground up. Investing in high school students allows us to introduce them early to a wide range of careers in healthcare…it’s part of our long-term workforce strategy to diversify our pipeline.”
Jennifer emphasized that wraparound supports, like transportation assistance, are essential to removing barriers to access for learners. But as ElevateEdAZ and Mayo Clinic demonstrate, the most effective collaborations go a step further, investing in both learner and employer readiness to set learners up for success.
ElevateEdAZ and its school partners support learners in growing their durable skills before they enter the workplace. Through a network of college and career coaches, learners receive support writing their resumes and completing applications. Many of ElevateEdAZ’s partner schools offer classes that make the unspoken norms of the workplace explicit for learners—things like showing up on time, communicating if they’ll be late, and responding to emails promptly. Jennifer shared an anecdote where a learner had a lightbulb moment during their internship, reflecting, “I learned really early on that I have to respond to emails.”
Equally important is preparing employers to host, train, and develop interns. At Mayo Clinic, Ron is an internal champion, setting expectations with interns and ensuring they are prepared to succeed not just in any workplace, but at Mayo Clinic. Mayo Clinic supervisors also have access to a mentorship platform that embeds different coaching topics. This provides structured support to supervisors as they help interns have valuable experiences. Ultimately, these supports help learners enter the workplace ready to contribute and equip employers to guide and grow the next generation of talent.
A Win-Win for Learners and Employers
“We view this more as an investment, and not a cost. These students may become future employees, interns, or even advocates for our mission. We track these outcomes like intern satisfaction or skill development post-program engagement, and that really helps us look at the ROI piece.”
Insights from the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation, ElevateEdAZ, and Mayo Clinic’s collaboration underscore that building immersive, high-touch career-connected learning opportunities takes time, trust, and a supportive infrastructure. These collaborations are well worth the effort, for both learners and employers.
By starting small, leveraging its position as an intermediary, and collaborating with employers like Mayo Clinic that invest in readiness for both learners and employers, the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation is helping to make career-connected learning a reality for Arizona learners.
