To grow, Brazil's technology sector needs to hire — and it isn't managing to, at the pace it would like. According to the 2026 Talent Shortage survey, published by ManpowerGroup in February, 83% of Brazilian companies in the Information sector reported difficulty filling positions, second only to Professional, Scientific and Technical Services, at 85%. Among the country's scarcest skills, IT and data rank right behind artificial intelligence.
That helps explain a common pattern in companies that use technology but don't sell it: the IT position was never opened a second time. Someone took over the network, the server and the passwords years ago — a technician hired early on, an employee from another department who "understood computers better," a relative who helped out once and never left the subject — and the company never got around to formalizing the role, let alone duplicating it.
The result is that the entire IT setup lives in one person's head. As long as that person is around, the business doesn't even notice. The problem shows up exactly on the day that person takes an extended leave, gets sick, or resigns — and by then it is too late to start writing down what should have been written down years earlier.
The weight of one person carrying all of IT
In a small or midsize company, IT rarely starts as a formal role. It grows on top of whoever happens to be available: the employee who fixed a network issue once, earned a reputation for "knowing about this stuff," and gradually became the single point of contact for everything — from resetting the Wi-Fi password to deciding which carrier to call when the internet goes down.
That informal growth has a direct consequence: nothing gets written down, because no one asked for it. There's no document describing how the network was set up, where the backup lives, what the contract terms are with the internet provider, or what to do if the server shuts down on its own. It's all stored in one person's memory, and only that person knows where to look.
The Relatório Perspectivas do Mercado de Trabalho do Macrossetor de TIC, published by Brasscom in May 2026, shows why that arrangement tends to last for years without changing: among technology companies planning to open positions — 82% of them within the next two years — the biggest hiring difficulty reported isn't a shortage of willing candidates. It's a shortage of technical knowledge, ranked as the top obstacle, ahead even of lack of experience.
If that's the bottleneck facing the technology sector itself — which has a hiring process, a budget, and market knowledge — a factory, a clinic, or an accounting office with no recruiting structure faces the same difficulty multiplied. Quickly hiring a second person who already knows how to run that specific environment isn't realistic. So the company doesn't try: it keeps relying on whoever is already there, and the dependency grows for one more year.
This isn't anyone's character flaw. The person carrying IT alone is usually competent and helpful — they solved so many things over time that they unintentionally became the only copy of a manual that never existed on paper.
Why the usual approach doesn't work
The usual way of dealing with this is not dealing with it: the company trusts that the person will keep being there, and only thinks about the issue when something breaks. Until that happens, no one stops to write down what only exists in someone's head — it feels like extra work for a problem that, up to that point, has never occurred.
When the absence arrives — even something as ordinary as a medical leave — the company runs straight into the obstacle the numbers above already show: finding someone with the right technical knowledge quickly is hard even for the technology sector itself, and harder still under pressure, with no hiring process ready and no time to train someone from scratch.
A common variation of the same problem is hiring a freelance technician only when something stops working, with no contract or routine — they fix what was asked and leave, without documenting what they did or how the environment is set up. By the next breakdown, no one, not even that technician, remembers exactly what changed last time.
Trying to hold on to that person with a raise or a personal appeal isn't a control either — it just postpones the day the risk turns into a bill. And the longer it goes undocumented, the bigger that bill gets.
What has to be in place
The goal isn't to stop someone from ever leaving the company — no one controls that. It's to stop one person's departure from stopping the whole company. That depends on mechanisms any well-run IT setup has, regardless of who happens to be in charge at the moment.
A complete inventory of what the company has. Every device, system, internet provider and contracted service recorded in a document that any new person can open and understand — not a memory that only exists in the head of whoever set up the network. The first of the CIS Controls, a set of security best practices maintained by the US-based Center for Internet Security, addresses exactly this: actively maintaining an inventory — tracked, and corrected — of every device connected to the company's network.
Access and passwords owned by the company, not the person. The domain registration, hosting, antivirus and backup accounts need to sit under a company account, with more than one person authorized — never just the personal email of whoever handles it today. Without this, someone's departure can mean losing access to the systems themselves.
More than one person able to run the essentials. It doesn't need to be a large team — it needs to not be a team of one. Even if the second person is an outside contact, they need to know the environment before the day they get called in a hurry.
Every vendor's contact in one place. Internet carrier, backup provider, support for the system in use — accessible without having to scroll through old messages or remember who talked to whom.
Tickets logged with cause and resolution. Every problem solved becomes a record, not a memory kept only by whoever solved it — so the next person doesn't reinvent the fix or repeat the same mistake.
A written plan for the first 24 hours without that person. Who steps in, what to check first, where the emergency passwords are — decided calmly, before it's needed.
This is how Skills IT works: with an environment inventory that stays up to date, more than one person able to run each client's critical systems, and a written plan for the first steps when someone steps away.
The gain for the company
The gain isn't abstract. A company with a documented environment doesn't lose days rebuilding from memory what it already knew: it finds the inventory, finds the right password, finds the vendor's contact — and is back up in hours, not weeks.
It also changes the size of the problem when the company needs to hire. A new candidate or vendor who receives a documented environment starts producing within days; one who gets only a secondhand memory spends weeks trying to understand what should already have been written down — and while that learning happens, any urgent ticket takes longer to resolve.
There's also a less obvious gain: a company that doesn't depend on one person negotiates better with that person. When someone's departure can freeze the entire operation, the company becomes a hostage — to salary, to mood, to availability. Documenting the environment relieves that pressure on both sides: the person stops carrying alone a risk they never asked to carry, and the company stops depending on goodwill to keep running.
Questions to bring to the next meeting
Better to find out the answer while the company is running normally, not in the middle of a crisis:
- If the person who handles IT disappeared tomorrow, would anyone know where the backup is? If the answer is "only they know," the risk already exists today, with no departure notice needed.
- Are the passwords for critical systems in a company account or in someone's personal email? If it's the latter, the company can lose its own access the day that person leaves.
- Is there a document with the inventory of equipment and providers, or is it all in one person's head? Without that document, every new hire starts from zero.
- Who else, besides that person, can run at least the essentials? If the answer is "no one," that's the first gap to close.
- Is there a written plan for the first 24 hours without that person? A plan made calmly costs far less than a decision made in a panic.
