WIMAUMA - For 20 years, Lynn Smith built a career as a hard-charging marketing executive, holding impressive titles with exciting companies.
Unfortunately most of those companies - and those well-paying jobs - no longer exist.
That's one reason Smith spent more than a year not long ago searching for work. And though she's now re-employed, and grateful for the work, she's desperately trying to dig out from under a mountain of debt on half her previous pay.
"I'm blessed I've been able to manage this long," Smith said. "I skate day to day on a razor's edge."
Smith is not alone. She and millions of other Americans have been caught in the grinding wheel of an economy that has started expanding but keeps destroying jobs.
Unlike in past recoveries, worker productivity is growing faster than gross domestic product. That has allowed companies to cut jobs and squeeze more work out of fewer employees. With globalization and the tech bust, it also means many of those jobs are gone forever.
That has been Smith's experience. Of her last three positions, one company is no longer in business; another has been acquired; the last, a go-go Internet marketing company that grew like kudzu for 18 months, has been slashed back to its roots.
Smith was laid off as general manager of Aspen Interactive in St. Petersburg about a month after Sept. 11, 2001. She remembers watching the second plane smash into the World Trade Center and having embarrassingly self-centered thoughts.
"I thought, "Why would anybody buy promotions? Something terrible has happened here,' " said Smith, who said demand had started softening a few months earlier. "Suddenly we were like kids with a roomful of toys and nobody to play with."
Upsets are nothing new to Smith, who was raised in a working-class family in Ocala. She entered the Army after high school with the prize of a free college education waiting at the end of a three-year stint.
After graduating from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Smith spent five years doing ad and multimedia production work in south Florida. For five years she ran her own ad company in Ocala, then spent two years as general manager of an outdoor company in Clearwater. When that company folded, she headed to Massachusetts in the early 1990s, landing a job as operations manager for Quantic Communications, a marketing spinoff of Digital Equipment Corp.
When Quantic lost the Digital account after two years, 50 jobs were cut, including Smith's. She returned to Ocala, spent eight months job hunting and ended up as director of marketing for Innovative Technology Inc., a Brooksville company that sells surge protectors to government and business. An acquisition by a British conglomerate meant elimination of her job in 2000. But now, with the economy booming and unemployment at all-time lows, Smith found herself in a seller's market.
An ad for "shuttle commander for crackerjack company hiding in St. Pete" caught her eye. Within a day she had the position, which paid a heady $80,000 a year. Her job: trying to manage the breakneck growth of Aspen Interactive, which had a seemingly endless flood of Fortune 100 clients.
Finally Smith felt like she was beyond striving. "I was in my mid-40s and on the road to thriving," she said. "I was even thinking about retiring."
Smith, who is single, found a house in the country, bought it with a VA loan for no money down and started pouring cash into upgrades. Less than a year later, she was trying to cover the $2,000-a-month mortgage on $275-a-week unemployment checks. Then the unemployment checks ran out, and Smith drained every penny out of her IRA and other savings.
Though she prides herself on her marketing abilities, Smith had a tough time selling herself to potential employers. She figures she sent out 70 resumes a week for 14 months. She landed six face-to-face-interviews and one job offer, which she snapped up in a flash.
Today Smith is marketing product manager for Bisk Education in Tampa. She said when she was hired it was made clear that opportunities for moving up in the company were limited and raises or bonuses unlikely.
"I do feel like my light is being hidden under a bushel a little bit, but that's appropriate for the position," she said. "All in all, it's working out quite well."
Bisk's online learning offerings are growing as people like Smith try to retool for new positions. Smith hopes to take advantage of one job benefit, free online MBA courses, to get a degree that she figures may be a baseline requirement for the next round of career moves.
With a marketer's ingrained optimism, Smith does the 45-minute commute each workday counting her blessings and trying to figure out how to conserve gas.
She could sell her house, but she'd still owe money on it. She could get a second job, but the first one was hard enough to find. She could sell something on e-Bay, but there's nothing of much value left.
"I can almost tell you to the day when I'll run out of my last dime," Smith said, her megawatt smile fading just a bit. "I will never retire. But whose idea was that anyway?"
