Manassas job fair draws crowd amid tough labor market

Unemployment is on the rise in Virginia.

Alex Karapetkov has sent out hundreds of job applications over the last six months with no luck. 

As a 2024 computer science graduate from James Madison University, he did not expect his first post-college job hunt to be so difficult.

“I was always told, ‘If you stuck with it and you graduated, then you would always have a guaranteed job, or you’d have a pretty good chance of landing a good job,’” Karapetkov told Dogwood at a recent job fair in Manassas. 

Unfortunately for Karapetkov, computer science graduates are dealing with historically high joblessness in a slowing market. The unemployment rate for computer science graduates was 6.1% in 2023, making it the seventh worst major for unemployment, according to a February 2025 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 

Meanwhile, nationally the labor market has added fewer jobs than expected. In Virginia, unemployment is rising as the region reckons with the Trump administration’s slashing of the federal workforce and cuts to federal spending. 

US Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D—Ashburn) worked with George Mason University to host the job fair at the school’s Science and Technology Campus in Manassas on Friday. Subramanyam, who has represented Virginia’s 10th congressional district since January, said his office organized the job fair in response to increased unemployment across Northern Virginia caused by the Trump administration’s federal workforce cuts. 

“We’re facing one of the worst unemployment situations in the country as a region,” Subramanyam said in an interview. 

The congressman said he’s heard from three different groups about the challenges of today’s job market. There are college graduates like Karapetkov “who feel like they’ve graduated at the wrong time” since there are fewer job opportunities, especially in the tech sector that so many of them were encouraged to pursue. 

There are job seekers who have been looking for an opportunity for so long they are close to giving up. And there are federal workers, like Emily Yates, who have been forced back on the job market through no fault of their own. 

Yates is a federal contractor who, in April, got caught up in Trump’s cuts to the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Food and Drug Administration. Yates, who is from Sterling but now lives in Washington, was at the Manassas job fair to seek out potential employers. 

Yates has never been laid off and wasn’t sure what to expect as she looked for something new. She does hope to someday return to working for the government, coming, as she does, from a family of civil servants. 

“I still believe in what government employees do for the American people,” Yates said in an interview. “I’m hopeful that the tide will turn at some point.” 

With unemployment on the rise in Virginia, some worry whether its social safety nets can withstand a surge in demand for things like unemployment insurance or food assistance. 

The Trump administration’s cuts – which Subramanyam called “cruel” – to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) could make it even harder for otherwise eligible people to tap into these benefits. Subramanyam said local food pantries are already seeing an uptick in demand. 

“We’re the richest country in the world,” Subramanyam said. “Why are we talking about cutting food assistance to kids? Why are we talking about cutting benefits to people who are losing their jobs because of no fault of their own?”