HACKENSACK, N.J. — After a decade out of the workforce and raising three children, Leslie Felner needed a paycheck again. But prospective employers dismissed her two master's degrees and experience as a health planner.

"I was being turned down for jobs I could do," said Felner, 47, of Fair Lawn, N.J. "They wanted to see recent and relevant paid experience."

Her frustration is shared by millions of women and men who try to return to work after taking a break to raise children or care for elderly relatives.

After all, only about 60 percent of American mothers are in the workforce when their children are younger than 6, according to federal data. But when they have children whose ages are between 6 and 17, about 77 percent of all American mothers are in the workforce. They return for a number of reasons: to help pay the family bills, to save for retirement, or simply because they find a job fulfilling.

Others are forced into the workplace unexpectedly, after a divorce or when a spouse dies or becomes unemployed. Many of these job seekers have minimal work experience or education.

Regardless of the circumstances, reentry is often a struggle.

"Most people are capable of getting jobs, but it's not easy," said Kate McAteer, coordinator of Women in Transition, a Wayne, N.J., nonprofit group that works with homemakers returning to work.

A break from work is also costly. A recent study found that women who step out of the employment market for three years or more lose 37 percent of their earning power.

Making the transition back to work is easier for people who are out for only a year or two — especially if they have kept up their contacts and skills, as job counselors strongly recommend.

But job hunters who have been out for many years are often unfamiliar with the technology that has transformed the American office. Their skills and professional networks have grown stale. Their old industries may even have disappeared.

Most of those who take time off for family reasons are women, but sometimes men do also. And in some cases they can face even more skepticism from prospective employers, because they're not traditionally thought of as family caregivers.

For any worker in transition, getting computer training is often the first, and most crucial, step.

"It's impossible to go into any work site without computer skills," McAteer said.

The good news is that this training is available in a number of places, including community colleges, business schools, and nonprofit groups. Displaced homemakers, who are forced to return to work by divorce or the death, disability or layoff of a spouse, can get state and federal grants to help pay for retraining.

"You feel like a nobody. It's scary," said Maria LaQuaglia, a job counselor at the Women's Right Information Center in Englewood, N.J., which works with displaced homemakers and other women returning to work.

"A lot of it is self-esteem," McAteer said. "A lot of people are more capable than they realize. Our own fears are our biggest enemy. A lot of people undersell themselves; they don't think they have anything to offer."

The job hunt can further batter their self-esteem. Ivone Braff, 47, of Montvale, N.J., has a college degree and 20 years of experience in marketing, advertising, and publishing. But when she reentered the workforce after seven years off with her son, she found that employers preferred recent college grads to "a person who's been out of the market so long."

"I had to change my expectations," said Braff, who is now doing temp work in a pharmaceutical company.

Office jobs are preferable to retail and restaurant jobs, say counselors at the Women's Rights Information Center, because they offer more opportunities for promotion.

"At least with office skills, you could advance to manager," LaQuaglia said.

One recent graduate of the women's center program is Beatrice Collins. A 34-year-old single mother, she worked in retail and then was unemployed for several years after the birth of her daughter four years ago.

Eventually, Collins landed on public assistance — an experience she found dispiriting.

To dig herself out, she attended computer classes at the center and got a Microsoft Office certification. Now she's a clerk in Englewood, N.J., — a job she said she couldn't have gotten without the help of the women's center.

Job-seekers are advised to look for work everywhere — in newspaper classified ads, on the Internet, in employment agencies — and to let everyone know they're looking. A neighbor, cousin, fellow soccer mom and the dentist: one of these people may know someone who's looking to hire.

"There's no one-size-fits-all," McAteer said. "Go out there and try everything you can. People who do that get jobs."

Job-hunters should also look for industries that are growing, where there's demand for workers and room for promotion. And they should focus on the employers' needs, not their own.

"No one is going to pay you just so you can pay your bills," said McAteer. "They want to know what kind of job you'll do and why they should hire you in particular."

But Jill Miller, president and CEO of Women Work, the National Center for Women's Employment, predicted that employers may soon realize they can't afford to ignore returning workers, because they'll be facing a labor shortage as baby boomers retire.

In some high-demand fields, such as accounting, corporations are already taking steps to bring back workers who have taken time off.

Felner's boss at the Center for Interreligious Understanding, Rabbi Jack Bemporad, was understanding about her years out of the workplace and her desire for a fulfilling job.

Bemporad looked for a hardworking, intelligent employee, rather than insisting on a narrow set of work skills — because he believes the right worker can learn those skills on the job.

"I felt she was the type of person I could trust," Bemporad said of Felner.

It took Felner about four years to find this good fit — illustrating another point made by counselors: Returning workers should not give up hope.

"I tell them, 'You'll get through it. And once you get through it, you're ready for the next thing, because there's always a new challenge in life,' LaQuaglia said.