Not Just a Government Town

Marketing Study Portrays Washington as Hub of 'Knowledge Workers' Attractive to Many Businesses

When it comes to its reputation as a major economic hub, Washington doesn't get the respect it deserves.

At least, that's what they say at the Greater Washington Initiative, an affiliate of the Greater Washington Board of Trade that promotes local business. Despite the region's disproportionately high number of educated workers, high-tech companies and financial institutions, they say, too many people still view Washington as a government town.

So GWI researchers gathered labor statistics, singled out professions and chose five other major metropolitan areas for comparison. What they say they learned, and plan to release tomorrow in a study called "Human Capital," is that compared with New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco-San Jose, Washington has the highest concentration of so-called knowledge workers.

What are knowledge workers? The term, coined half a century ago, refers generally to members of a well-educated labor force. Now it's often used in conjunction with the term "creative class" -- a newer phrase that also includes artistic, innovative people who can help large cities change and thrive. The GWI study says there are 1.1 million knowledge workers in Washington's regional labor force of 3.1 million.

The study is aimed as a marketing tool, to tout the area's robust job market to companies that could be looking to expand here.

"Regions are becoming much more specialized in what they do, and companies are moving to where the human capital is," said Steven W. Pedigo, research director of the Greater Washington Initiative. "This study says we have the workforce to serve a wide variety of sectors. Basically, if you're educated and have general skills, you're going to be very employable here."

To structure the study, GWI researchers made specific and in some ways idiosyncratic decisions. They used a federal definition of the Washington metropolitan area, which includes the District; Alexandria and Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Stafford, Prince William, Spotsylvania and Fauquier counties in Virginia; as well as Montgomery, Prince George's, Frederick, Charles, St. Mary's and Calvert counties -- though not Howard or Anne Arundel -- in Maryland. But unlike federal measurements, it combined San Francisco and San Jose into one metropolitan area for comparison purposes.

The metropolitan areas, which vary widely in population, were chosen because the researchers considered them Washington's chief competitors for workers, deals and status as a world capital.

The study's definition of knowledge worker includes not only physicians, engineers and teachers but also fashion designers, actors, models and musicians. Researchers said they were looking for jobs that require some kind of college degree or specialized training, or that would be desirable to a creative workforce. They didn't tally chief executives, saying that most would be counted in other categories.

A theme across the data is that rapid growth in many industries has caused a labor shortage in Washington. In addition to the nationwide labor crunches in the health-care and accounting fields, local companies need lawyers, marketing executives, scientists and graphic designers. Even though thousands of jobs go unfilled, Pedigo thinks companies will be eager to join the mix by moving here.

The report makes some points that many urban economists have long held to be true. Washington is largely a white-collar town that naturally attracts an educated class. Blessed with an abundance of federal money, powerful bureaucrats and little reliance on fickle industrial trades, the area has "been kind of lucky up to this point," said Richard Florida, a George Mason University professor of regional economic development who helped define and popularize the concept of the creative class.

Florida, who served as an informal adviser to the study's researchers (Pedigo was one of his students at Carnegie Mellon University), pointed out that there are a handful of smaller American urban areas with concentrations of knowledge workers similar to Washington's. These include Boulder, Colo., and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.

"We've grown up . . . and now we're competing with the top 10 to 20 centers of commerce of the world," Florida said. "We have to make sure we are on par with London, Shanghai, Dubai. If we don't, we'll fall back to where we were. Our workers have options -- they'll go someplace else."

Others say Washington is already a big-league player. But as the region's economy has been propelled forward, it has also been cursed with high housing costs and nightmarish traffic -- two things that could spell a death sentence for the area's ability to attract high-caliber workers, said Anirban Basu, chief executive of Sage Policy Group, an economic consulting company in Baltimore.

"Washington's economy has much more depth than it did 15 years ago, but the price of entry is also much higher," he said. "For younger workers, they'd love to move to Washington, but it's simply too expensive for them. So they stay in regions of the country that may be less attractive, but at least they're more affordable."

Database editor Sarah Cohen contributed to this report.