“At Frontex, I work as an information officer for the Risk Analysis Unit. One of my main tasks is to coordinate information gathering following interviews with migrants. We ensure that every person who has crossed the border is properly identified.
We want to fully understand who they are, where they have come from, and how they have arrived. The information we gather is later put together in different documents such as analytical reports or the Annual Risk Analysis published by Frontex every spring.
This is a very demanding job which requires a lot of empathy, understanding, and knowledge. We have the closest contact with migrants, which provides us with a unique opportunity to identify vulnerable groups, for instance minors or victims of human trafficking. We deal with people who are travel-exhausted because they had walked for several days, victims of criminal activity who had spent all their savings or generated a large amount of debt to pay for their journey.
To perform this job well it is important to observe, have good verbal and non-verbal communication skills, and constantly brush up on your knowledge of different migration routes, and the political and social situation of migrants' countries of origin, transit, and departure.
Frontex provides additional expertise and support to its host countries. The Agency provides know-how not only to EU countries but also EU partners in the Western Balkans.”
Debriefing officers carry out voluntary and anonymous interviews with arriving migrants in order to collect information for risk analysis purposes on irregular migration and cross-border crimes including trafficking in human beings and terrorism by employing appropriate interviewing techniques.