Want a Successful Career? Where You Live May Be More Important Than You Think

How important is it to live where there is a concentration of bright, creative individuals in your career or industry? This is one of the questions Richard Florida examines in his best-selling book, Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life. Florida is an American urban studies theorist and professor at the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto. He contends that, for maximum career success and life satisfaction, place does matter. He uses his own and others’ research to build his case, and challenges those who assert that where one lives is irrelevant in the new world of technology and virtual work.

In 1988, Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Lucas identified the economic power of what he called the “clustering force” – the clustering of people, productivity, creative skills and talents that powers economic growth. For the past 50 or so years, the population in the U.S. has been migrating to large metropolitan areas. This migration has involved highly skilled, highly educated and highly paid people moving to a relatively small number of areas.

This “creative class”, according to Florida, includes knowledge workers in science and technology, arts and design, entertainment and media, law, finance, management, healthcare and higher education. Where there is a higher concentration of the creative class, especially in a particular career or industry, the potential for face-to-face networking, working together, sharing ideas, and generating breakthrough work increases exponentially. Productivity and innovation soar, and economic growth ensues. When individuals live where there are higher concentrations of workers in their career, their potential for professional success soars as well. So Florida and the data he uses demonstrates that choosing a career and choosing where one lives become equally important decisions for those who aim to be at the top of their field.

Florida examined data from the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics to examine the geography of jobs and work by region. He found that the work we do is growing more and more specialized, not just by field but also by location. Regions are becoming more distinct in the kinds of jobs they offer.

We see this specialization in the well-known concentrations of financial jobs in New York, technology in Silicon Valley, filmmaking in Los Angeles, and the music industry in Nashville. This is not happening in every career. Physicians, lawyers, nurses and teachers are in demand just about everywhere, and their pay is fairly consistent around the country.  What cities have attracted – and benefit from – clusters of certain kinds of creative class workers?

Austin, TX: Semi-Conductor Engineers

In other chapters in Who’s Your City? Florida addresses the implications of other population clustering around the U.S., viewed from the lenses of education, income, happiness, age/stage of life, and diversity groups. One unusual chapter describes the personalities of certain cities and regions. In summary, the chapter on jobs and careers represents only a slice of this interesting – and eminently readable – book.