Fairfax County Supervisor Rodney Lusk, who chairs the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, introduces Talent Capital, an initiative to help former feds find jobs, on Wednesday at JP Morgan's office in downtown D.C. Local business and government leaders are launching a job website and $500,000 ad campaign designed to keep retired and laid-off federal workers from leaving the region.

The website, dubbed Talent Capital, will connect job seekers with job listings tailored to their interests and expertise, share training and reskilling opportunities and offer individual coaching. It features an AI agent who walks users through the experience.

The initiative was unveiled Wednesday morning, less than 12 hours after the federal government shut down for the first time since 2018-2019, at a crowded media event featuring D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, Maryland Secretary of Labor Portia Wu and officials with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, Greater Washington Partnership and the Greater Washington Board of Trade. Roughly 200 people were in attendance.

“We’ve got the most talented workforce in the entire country, hands down,” said Clark Mercer, executive director of COG, where the initiative is being housed. “The workforce here is going through a pretty significant transition with what’s happening at the federal level — this impacts not only federal workers but contractors.”

The goal is to retain thousands of local federal employees and contractors who lost their jobs amid Trump administration cuts as other states look to lure them away. It will be available for any job seeker to use.

The initiative comes as regional unemployment is rising and the region’s total number of federal jobs is the lowest it’s been since the Great Recession.

Further contraction is imminent. There are roughly 154,000 federal employees nationwide who took the Trump administration’s deferred resignation offer and will be out jobs either Sept. 30 or at the end of December, according to The Washington Post, though it’s not yet clear how many are in the D.C. region. The Trump administration also has directed agencies to prepare plans for mass layoffs to occur during the shutdown.

The federal contraction makes it even more important to focus on retaining talent and growing opportunities within industries outside of the federal sector, said Paul Kihn, D.C.’s deputy mayor for education, who spearheaded the Talent Capital site.

Apart from aggregating existing resources and delivering them to users based on their geography, the effort will also seek to encourage growth in key sectors where Kihn said job opportunities remained greater than average through June: IT and cybersecurity; financial technology; health sciences; sports and entertainment; and consulting and business services.

“As we spotlight jobs and employers, we're working to nudge folks into those sectors where we know there will be the highest numbers of jobs in the future,” Kihn said, noting employers can communicate directly with job seekers on the site.

He’s aiming to add a “direct to interview” feature soon where employers agree to interview anyone who comes out of a certain certification program.

But the success of Talent Capital hinges on local employers having job openings — and lots of them — to absorb those workers. It's not clear that's the case, at least not yet, though D.C. officials are focused on attracting new businesses to locate here. On the widely used job site Indeed, the number of postings for positions based in Greater Washington were down 14.9% year-over-year during the week ending Sept. 26. In July, postings for D.C.-area jobs were at their lowest level since late 2020, when the country was still in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. Only one major private employer, Washington Gas, spoke at the event.

So far COG has identified public and private funding for one year, during which the site will be continuously updated. The initiative was launched with a grant from the Greater Washington Community Foundation, led by Tonia Wellons, along with funding from D.C. and Prince George's, Montgomery and Fairfax counties. The total funding was not immediately disclosed.

The infrastructure for the site is being managed by D.C.’s BuildWithin, a workforce development-focused software company founded three years ago by former D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and Ximena Hartstock, director of parks and recreation under Mayor Adrian Fenty. The company previously handled apprenticeship matching for a program under Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and done work for the D.C. Department of Employment Services, Kihn said.

Business leaders also announced an advertising campaign that will direct job seekers to the Talent Capital site but also try to counter messages from other jurisdictions, such as New York, that have launched ad campaigns to poach the region’s workforce amid the federal layoffs.

The ad campaign “really is an immediate reaction to that — to be able to say to our displaced workers that we do care about you,” said Washington Business Journal Publisher Alex Orfinger, who led fundraising from local governments and businesses for the ad campaign and said nearly $500,000 had been raised so far.

Ad deals have been signed with a range of media organizations as well as Monumental Sports & Entertainment, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and others, Orfinger said.

The Brand Guild, a D.C.-based advertising and marketing agency, developed the campaign, which uses the tagline “open for business, driven by purpose.”

Orfinger and Wellons have formed a loosely based coalition of local business groups called Greater Washington Together to work on the talent issue.

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