There's good news and bad news in the IT jobs market at the moment. The good news is new companies are being created in the mobile data field and the unemployed in the telecoms sector are finding new jobs. The bad news is vacancies in the IT marketplace are down 50% on last year.

It is difficult to know whether we are coming to the end of a bad patch or whether it is only the beginning. "It's much like the 90s," says Paul Smith, managing director of Harvey Nash Technology Practice. "Technology is not a single market and not all parts slow down at the same time. After a corporate buying slowdown and staff losses, businesses take on IT people because they need to improve efficiency." He says that there are still 300,000 vacancies in Europe for IT positions.

So might it be the beginning of an upturn, or a false dawn? Unfortunately there are so many variables, it seems up to the individual to take pot-luck.

"The areas where there are opportunities are IT specialist skills and consultancy skills," says Smith. He reports that software development skills like Linux, HTML and web design skills are still very much in demand as are managers with commercial knowledge who know how to take a company through poor market conditions.

And poor market conditions have been most pronounced this year. The Amalgamated Engineering Electrical Union (AEEU) reports that 500,000 jobs have gone in the IT and telecoms sector. "We're hearing of about 600 job losses every day, and those are the ones we know about," says spokesman Simon Baugh. Among the high profile names shedding jobs have been Motorola, Marconi and Nortel. These companies anticipate growth next year, stimulated by new wireless technologies such as Bluetooth.

But for the time being it is redundancies that are hitting the headlines. And it is the way a company manages large-scale redundancies among its workforce that defines its long-term reputation as an employer. The minister of enterprise and lifelong learning, Wendy Alexander, set up an organisation to help the unemployed at Motorola's Bathgate site in Scotland called the Motorola taskforce in conjunction with Scottish Enterprise Edinburgh and Lothian. It has been aiding and tracking those made redundant at the site since May.

The idea behind the taskforce was to provide support and advice with the view to finding people jobs, information on retraining opportunities or help with starting their own business. It reports that of more than 2,500 people made redundant, 1,311 have found new jobs, while a further 200 are looking to set up their own business.

The taskforce arranged job fairs which allowed local employers in the area including the oil and gas sector and financial services to come and find the staff they needed. "Eighty per cent of the companies attending the job fairs were looking for basic IT skills," says Charlene O'Connor, leader of the taskforce. "We're getting some great successes."

Of those people who are retraining, the vast majority are working on the European Computer Driving Licence, which is a programme providing training on Microsoft Word, the use of email and the internet. "Overall we have l,600 individual training interventions, and a big proportion of those are IT-linked," says O'Connor. The taskforce will continue until the redundancies end.

New companies starting off in the telecoms sector encourage the view that the worst of the recession is coming to an end. But they are not having a signficant impact on the jobs market yet.

Startups such as Terenci are seconding staff from their joint-venture partners. Terenci is a Dusseldorf-based integrated mobile services company comprising Vodafone, Cap Gemini and Ernst & Young. It has just taken on 25 staff, most of whom it seconded from Cap Gemini, including consultants, project managers and HR specialists. The company intends to integrate mobile services with internet and IT solutions to address the growing needs of European businesses and to make mobile technology an integral part of their operational processes.

All the projects they are working on at the moment involve mobile data solutions and some customer-resource management applications. But the market is quiet in the UK at the moment. "We probably have more business in continental Europe than in the UK." says solutions team-leader John Mansell. "It's a 70-30 split."

Mobile data was given a huge boost recently by Price Waterhouse Coopers, which said that it is piloting the technology with its clients. "What is now coming is the maturity of software and devices," partner Christopher Pearson said. "These devices will quickly replace laptop computers for most professional users." So mobile data's future looks assured.

It is a shame the same cannot be said of the application services provider ASP sector, which was supposed to the be the saviour of the telecoms companies. "There aren't a lot of ASPs recruiting right now, everyone is watching overhead very closely," says Phil Wainewright of ASP News. The only people likely to be appointed in this climate are people with specific skills or very good contacts.

So the picture is patchy. Job creation in some sectors, continued redundancy in others. But the intervention of the public sector in Scotland at least, has provided a pointer to the way redundancies could be managed.