A few years ago, discussing staffing shortages in IT was relatively simple. Companies were growing and projects were multiplying, so organizations continuously needed developers, testers, administrators, and analysts. Today, the landscape looks very different. The market is no longer hiring everything and everyone; companies are taking a much more cautious approach to headcounts, and automation and artificial intelligence are taking over simpler tasks. Yet, across many projects, finding professionals with specific expertise remains remarkably difficult.

This apparent paradox is one of the most interesting phenomena in the 2026 IT market. The core challenge is rarely a sheer lack of headcount. Far more often, organizations lack a specific skill at the exact moment it is required for a project.

Hiring Slows Down, but the Skill Gap Remains

Recent data from ManpowerGroup illustrates this dynamic clearly. In their "2026 Talent Shortage" study, 57% of Polish employers reported difficulties finding candidates with the right skills. In the Information and Communication technology sector, that figure rises to 67%. At the same time, tech companies are taking a much more conservative approach to increasing headcount, increasingly opting to maintain current team sizes.

At first glance, these two trends seem contradictory. If companies struggle to find people, why are they scaling back recruitment? The answer is straightforward: organizations rarely just need "another IT worker." More often, they need someone with specific experience, for a specific project, at a precise stage—and not necessarily on a permanent multi-year contract.

This represents a fundamentally different challenge than a traditional labor shortage.

Europe Has More IT Specialists, but Still Not Where They Are Needed Most

According to Eurostat, approximately 10.45 million ICT specialists were employed in the European Union in 2025, representing about 5% of the total workforce. While their share of the labor market has grown noticeably over the past decade, the growth rate in the absolute number of specialists has begun to slow.

The data regarding specific skill sets is even more telling. In the Linux Foundation's "State of Tech Talent Europe 2026" report, nearly half of surveyed European organizations cited resource shortages in cybersecurity and compliance. A similar gap exists in AI and ML engineering and operations, alongside significant shortages in FinOps, platform engineering, and cloud computing.

This highlights a key market shift: a company can employ hundreds of IT professionals and still lack the single individual capable of designing a secure Kubernetes environment, building data architecture for an AI solution, executing an Azure migration, or preparing the organization for stringent security requirements.

In these scenarios, the issue is not team size. It is timely access to the right expertise.

AI Doesn't Eliminate Skill Gaps—It Accelerates Their Evolution

Two extreme narratives continue to surround artificial intelligence: one claims AI will soon replace most IT professionals, while the other asserts that nothing fundamental will change. Reality, however, lies in a far more compelling middle ground.

The Linux Foundation notes that European organizations expect AI to have a net positive impact on tech employment in 2026. At the same time, AI engineering, cybersecurity, and the infrastructure needed to deploy AI solutions rank among the areas with the most severe skill shortages today.

PwC reaches a similar conclusion. An analysis of over one billion job postings revealed that in roles most exposed to AI, required skills are evolving more than twice as fast as in roles less impacted by the technology.

This observation shows that AI will not simply reduce demand for specialists. Instead, it rapidly shifts the profile of required skills. Organizations still need talent to prepare data, design architectures, secure environments, control infrastructure costs, integrate new tools into legacy systems, and maintain operations.

Consequently, companies may require fewer people for certain traditional tasks, but will far more rapidly need expertise that didn't exist inside their organizations just a few years ago.

Poland Faces an Additional Challenge

In its "Digital Decade 2026" report, the European Commission notes that Poland's ICT talent pool remains stagnant. At the same time, the country has ground to cover in enterprise digitalization and the adoption of advanced technologies, particularly within the SME sector.

This creates a demanding environment for businesses. On one hand, companies must deploy AI, expand cloud adoption, develop data capabilities, automate processes, and elevate cybersecurity standards. On the other hand, the pool of specialists possessing these critical skills is not growing fast enough to meet demand.

This is not uniquely a Polish issue. The World Economic Forum's "Future of Jobs Report 2025" indicates that 63% of employers view skill gaps as a primary barrier to business transformation. Furthermore, nearly 40% of core job skills are expected to change by 2030, with AI, big data, networks, cybersecurity, and broad technological competencies among the fastest-growing areas.

If these projections hold, organizations must learn not only how to recruit, but crucially how to acquire and shift competencies rapidly to where they are needed most.

Does Every Required Skill Need a Full-Time Employee?

This does not mean companies should abandon internal IT teams. Quite the opposite—internal knowledge of architecture, systems, processes, and core business functions is strategic and should remain in-house. Outsourcing should never be a attempt to replace everything inside an organization.

The issue arises when organizations try to address every new, temporary need with a permanent headcount.

A company might need an Azure Architect for six months during a cloud migration. A different project might require two DevOps engineers to streamline Kubernetes environments and CI/CD pipelines. Before a security audit, a cybersecurity specialist is needed, while an AI initiative might demand Data Engineering or MLOps expertise. In a year's time, those specific needs may disappear, replaced by entirely different demands.

Attempting to permanently staff every conceivable specialization internally is extraordinarily expensive and often lacks business justification. Conversely, waiting months for a standard recruitment cycle to finish can be equally costly.

The Highest Cost Often Comes from Waiting

In discussions about IT talent, significant focus is placed on rates, salaries, and recruitment fees. Far less time is spent calculating what a skill gap actually costs an organization week after week.

When a project lacks a crucial role for two months, the work doesn't vanish—it falls on existing team members. A senior developer spends time managing infrastructure instead of building core features; an architect handles daily operations; a CTO steps in on project tasks; and backlogs get pushed back. Inevitably, project deadlines slip.

The cost is not merely an unfilled position. It is the diverted focus of other team members, slower execution speed, heightened project risk, and delayed deployment of solutions designed to drive revenue or cost savings.

Before starting the next debate over whether a contractor's rate should be a few percent lower, it is worth asking a different question: what does a month without that expert in the project actually cost the business?

IT Outsourcing as Access to Expertise

This is why viewing outsourcing or body leasing merely as "renting developers" is an outdated perspective. Mature IT outsourcing is fundamentally about managing access to expertise that an organization does not need—or cannot justify keeping—on a permanent basis.

An organization maintains its core internal team, along with deep domain knowledge of its business, architecture, and processes, while retaining the flexibility to augment that team with specialized talent at exact key moments. Depending on the need, this might mean bringing in a single software architect, a Java developer, or an entire team specialized in Data, DevOps, Kubernetes, or cybersecurity.

This distinction highlights the difference between a true technology partner and a vendor that simply forwards CVs. When a client requests three developers, the first step should be understanding why they need them, what is happening in the project, what the timeline looks like, and what is truly blocking progress. Sometimes the answer is indeed three additional developers. Other times, the bottleneck lies in system architecture, infrastructure, lack of automation, or a specialized skill set that wasn't initially accounted for.

How We Approach This at Sorigo

At Sorigo, this philosophy guides how we work with clients. We can augment an existing team with an individual specialist or build a complete, dedicated team tailored to a specific project. Our core practice areas include Cloud and Cloud Native, Kubernetes and DevOps, AI and Data, Cybersecurity, Development, Architecture, Analysis, and QA.

Our goal is not to replace internal client teams, but to ensure that an organization never has to pause a project simply because it lacks a specific skill set internally at a given moment.

The tech market will continue to evolve, and the pace of change will accelerate rather than slow down. The competencies companies need today will not be identical to those required in two or three years.

Consequently, the primary question is no longer "how many people should we hire?", but rather "can we deliver the right expertise to our organization precisely when it is needed?"

In many projects, the most expensive specialist is the one who isn't there when you need them most.