Workforce leaders say the Rio Grande Valley job market isn’t what you think

When Valley Baptist Medical Center Brownsville tried to replace a longtime employee who left the company, the employment market had shifted, the organization’s CEO told workforce development executives during a Rio Grande Valley-wide State of the Workforce Conference on Friday at South Padre Island. 

Instead of hiring one person willing to work often seven days in a row and accept on-call shifts 15 days a month, the hospital system split the position in half and hired two people who asked for work-life balance. 

“I think that we need to stop saying they don’t make employees like they used to — especially us old people who have been doing this a while,” Leslie Bingham, chief executive officer for Valley Baptist Medical Center-Brownsville, said. “They stayed until the work was done every day. They were just [an] amazing employee. When we went to recruit to replace that employee, we kept trying to find another employee like that. We finally built a position with two people. Our candidates wanted to know about work-life balance.” 

The private education and health services sector employs the most workers across the Rio Grande Valley, representing 145,000 jobs between the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission and Brownsville-Harlingen metro areas in September, according to Texas Workforce Commission data based on Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates. That’s up 900 jobs, or 0.62%, from September 2025.