The absence of policies aimed at the training of teachers working in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Brazil represents an important point of attention, and several authors have more recently called attention to the importance of teacher training who work at this level of education, both public and private HEIs. The article presents the results of a research that sought to analyze the main challenges at the beginning of the teaching activity faced by teachers of Social Communication courses hired because of their professional expertise, without having, however, pedagogical training. This is a qualitative research, whose analysis was based on data obtained through semi-structured interviews with professors from two private HEIs in Rio de Janeiro. The results indicated several types of difficulties faced by teachers in the teaching practice, which, in the absence of institutional policies and initiatives geared to pedagogical training, relied only on the informal help of their peers, developed their own strategies for the exercise of their function, and in many cases, their professional expertise, engendering different strategies for coping with the difficulties presented in the daily routine of the classroom.