The IT talent shortage has not disappeared. It has evolved.
For years, organisations focused on scaling development teams to support digital transformation initiatives. Today, the challenge is increasingly about accessing specialised expertise. Cloud modernisation, AI adoption, cybersecurity, data platforms, and enterprise integration all require skills that are harder to find and even harder to build quickly.
As a result, technology leaders are shifting their focus from hiring more people to building teams with the right mix of capabilities.
Key takeaways
- The IT talent shortage is becoming a skills challenge. 76% of IT employers in CEE struggle to find the skills they need. Enterprises increasingly need combinations of technical capabilities rather than simply more developers.
- Deep expertise still matters. AI, cloud, cybersecurity, data and enterprise architecture require specialised knowledge. The most valuable professionals combine that depth with the ability to work across adjacent disciplines.
- Adaptability is becoming more valuable. Technology projects change, so teams need people who can broaden their expertise and take on adjacent responsibilities.
- Team composition matters as much as headcount. The goal is to combine complementary capabilities that can evolve with the project.
- External teams can fill specific capability gaps. Enterprises can combine internal hiring and development with specialised external expertise when a capability is hard to recruit or only needed for a defined period.
The IT talent shortage is becoming a skills shortage
The CEE technology market illustrates this shift. According to NATEK's CEE IT Market Report 2026, the region's long-standing talent gap is increasingly becoming a qualitative skills gap with 76% of IT employers report difficulty finding the skills they require. Poland alone has around 452,000 IT specialists, yet the report describes its former talent gap as having turned into a “specialisation gap”. Junior developers are now in oversupply, with entry-level salaries falling by roughly 5% year-on-year, while demand remains strong for specialised expertise in areas including cybersecurity, cloud architecture and AI.
Demand is particularly strong for AI-related roles, including software engineers with AI skills, data scientists, cloud engineers and cybersecurity specialists. In 2025, Poland alone recorded an estimated 64,000 job postings for AI specialists. At the same time, the report highlights a gap between using AI-enabled tools and having advanced skills in areas such as machine learning, model development and complex deployment.
That changes the question technology leaders need to ask.
Instead of:
"How many developers do we need?"
The more useful question is:
"What capabilities does this project actually require?"
“The challenge for enterprises is becoming less about simply finding enough people and more about finding the right combination of capabilities, both across the team and within individual roles. Deep expertise remains essential, but technology projects are increasingly dynamic, so organisations need specialists who can also broaden their expertise, learn on the go and step into adjacent areas when the project requires it. The real challenge is therefore to build teams of complementary, adaptable people who can expand their capabilities together and collectively deliver what the project requires.”
At NATEK, we increasingly see organisations looking for combinations of expertise rather than individual roles. Requests that once focused primarily on software development now often include cloud, cybersecurity, data, and architecture capabilities from the outset. This reflects a broader shift toward capability-led workforce planning, where the challenge is not simply adding capacity but assembling the expertise needed to deliver complex technology initiatives.
This view is echoed by other contributors to the report. Piotr Chrapała, CTO of B‑INFINIT, the BNP Paribas CIB Poland IT hub, has recruited more than 100 people for their IT Production area over the past three years. Yet when it comes to AI, his focus is not on hiring dedicated AI specialists but on developing existing engineers, with AI competencies treated as an extension of existing skills rather than a standalone role. In other words, strong AI capability often comes from experienced engineers who keep expanding what they can do.
Why more developers do not always solve the problem
Consider an enterprise modernising a legacy platform.
It may need software engineers to build new functionality, but development capacity alone will not address every part of the project. The team may also need:
- Cloud architects to design the target environment
- Data engineers to rebuild pipelines and integrations
- Cybersecurity specialists to address security and compliance requirements such as NIS2
- DevOps engineers to automate infrastructure and deployment
- QA engineers to build automated testing
- Enterprise architects to manage dependencies between systems
- Delivery leadership to coordinate the work
Hiring more developers can increase engineering capacity while leaving the actual bottleneck untouched. Cybersecurity is a clear example. Poland recorded around 33,500 cybersecurity job postings in 2025 and the report notes that, under NIS2, companies are increasingly prioritising cybersecurity experts over generalist developers.
This is why capability density matters. A smaller team with complementary expertise can sometimes provide more useful project capacity than a larger team with similar skill profiles.
What specialised teams look like in practice
A specialised team is not simply a collection of niche experts. Its value comes from combining complementary skills around a specific business or technology problem.
An AI implementation, for example, may require AI and software engineering, data engineering, cloud architecture, cybersecurity, integration, QA and DevOps. Not every project needs all of these capabilities permanently, but the right expertise needs to be available when it becomes relevant.
The same applies to cloud migration, cybersecurity programmes, data platform development and legacy modernisation.
Instead of building every capability internally and maintaining it indefinitely, organisations can combine permanent employees with external specialists when a particular capability is difficult to recruit or only needed for a defined period.
What does this mean for IT hiring?
The shift does not mean enterprises should stop hiring developers. Software engineers remain fundamental to modern technology organisations.
It means companies need to look beyond job titles and headcount.Before starting another recruitment campaign, technology leaders should ask:
Where is the actual capability gap?
If a project is blocked by cloud architecture, hiring more developers will not solve the problem. If the bottleneck is data engineering or cybersecurity, adding general development capacity may have limited impact.
The second question is:
Which capabilities need to remain internal?
Some knowledge is strategically important and should be developed inside the organisation. Other expertise can be accessed externally when demand is temporary, highly specialised or difficult to recruit for.
Aneta Kolankowska, CIO at BNP Paribas, takes the argument further in the NATEK CEE IT Market Report 2026. In her view, the skills gap is not caused by a lack of talent, but by fast-growing demand in specialised areas such as cloud, data, AI and cybersecurity, while junior roles remain oversupplied. As a result, the emphasis moves from "whom can we hire" to "whom can we develop" and organisations that build environments for growth gain competencies that are difficult to replicate.
Why CEE matters
Central and Eastern Europe has long been an important technology talent market for international companies. Its role is increasingly moving beyond providing development capacity toward providing access to specialised expertise. As senior salaries in countries such as Poland and Czechia converge with those in Western Europe, the region increasingly competes on expertise and organisational maturity rather than on labour cost alone.
NATEK's CEE IT Market Report 2026 identifies growing demand across the region for AI, data, cloud and cybersecurity capabilities. Poland is currently the largest AI talent hub in CEE, ranking first in the region and seventh in the EU by the number of professionals developing and deploying AI systems.
For enterprises, this creates another way to approach the talent problem.
Instead of asking only:
"Where can we find more developers?"
They can ask:
"Where can we access the expertise required for this project?"
That distinction is important when specialist recruitment takes months or when a company does not need a particular capability permanently. CEE can provide access to specialised technology capabilities alongside broader engineering capacity, giving enterprises another route besides internal hiring.
The future of IT teams is about capability, not headcount
The nature of the IT talent shortage is changing. Enterprises still need software developers, but increasingly they also need specialised expertise around AI, cloud, data, cybersecurity and complex enterprise environments.
The practical response is not necessarily to build larger teams. It is to build teams around the capabilities required by the business problem.That can mean hiring internally, developing existing engineers, or bringing in specialised external teams.
The starting point should always be the same: define the capability gap first, then decide how to fill it.
Looking for the right IT outsourcing partner?
If your organisation needs specialised technology capabilities without building every function internally, NATEK can help you design and scale the right team for your requirements.
Contact Andrzej Osman, Sales Prospection Team Lead at NATEK, to discuss your technology needs and explore the right delivery model for your project.
