"Everybody is now finding the labor market very competitive, very much like it was in 1998," says Steven Fuller, a public policy professor at George Mason University who studies the area's economy.
Out of 77,000 jobs created in the D.C. area in the past year, 60 percent of the jobs were in Northern Virginia and 55 percent or 47,000 jobs were in Fairfax County, Fuller says.
Fuller says all sectors of the economy are looking for employees.
"There is a shortage of qualified workers willing to work for the wage they might have worked at last year," he says.
Because many companies are finding they have to raise wages to attract workers, Fuller says companies are either cutting into their profits or passing along the costs to customers in the form of higher prices.