If you have been a stay-at-home mom and you’re thinking of returning to the working world, author Loretta Kaufman has a suggestion for you: Make a pie.

No, she doesn’t mean you should enter the Pillsbury Bake-Off or apply for a position at Sexual Stereotypes R Us. Draw the pie, then divide it into slices of varying size that are based on what is most important to you. What piece is the biggest: money, flexibility, professional challenge?

Putting together the paper pie and focusing on those big pieces will help you decide where you should hunt for jobs and in which direction your career should go, said Kaufman, the co-author of “Going Back to Work: A Survival Guide for Comeback Moms” (St. Martin’s Griffin). You also need to decide whether you even want a “career” at all.

“One of the hardest things for these women to decide is whether they want a career or a job,” Kaufman said. She explained that some people want to put in the extra hours and push for professional advancement at work, while others are more concerned with the right niche than with the trappings of money or prestige.

In their book, a follow-up to “And What Do You Do? When Women Choose to Stay Home,” Kaufman and co-author Mary Quigley describe what they discovered after dozens of interviews and an online survey of almost 1,000 women. Although the book is obviously concerned with women, most of the tips certainly could apply to men who had been stay-at-home fathers and are now returning to the workforce.

Flexibility was the top priority among those surveyed, and the book suggests that job sharing often is an effective strategy. If the two people work well together, the employer will know that one of them is always covering the base, but it lets the workers coordinate with just one colleague rather than having several people’s schedules involved.

If you want to have effective job sharing, the authors suggest that you:

— Use a single phone number and give the team a name, then get into the habit of answering the phone with that name. That way everyone else in your company doesn’t have to waste time figuring out which one of you is working which day.

— Find a partner whose strengths complement yours, so the team doesn’t have any glaring weakness. “If one of you has a strong business sense while the other is a better writer,” they explain, “you are each bringing valuable assets to the table.”

— Get yourselves into the habit of using “we” rather than “I,” so that people automatically think of you as a partnership.

In a telephone interview, Kaufman said that taking the time off to raise children often has the side benefit of giving people time to reflect on their careers. New interests they develop while raising the children might lead them to tweak their previous jobs, become entrepreneurs or change industries.

She said people who intend to take long leaves should always keep in mind the prospect of returning to work. That means staying in touch with business contacts — enhancing them if you can — and even focusing parental volunteer work on skills that might be useful in one workplace or another.

“What we would suggest to people is to take leadership positions,” Kaufman said. “Work on capital campaigns.”

She also suggests befriending 15-year-old techies in the neighborhood so you can pick up computer skills, which have become necessary in almost any job. Workplaces change so quickly that even if you were comfortable with computers when you left, new programs and techniques might leave you stymied if you don't get help in staying current.

When it gets to the point of going through interviews and negotiating for a job, Kaufman says it’s best not to push for flexibility too early in the process unless it’s a necessity.

A more effective technique is almost always to wait six months and do your job well. Once your bosses are able to see how responsible you are, they will be more likely to grant you extra flexibility.