Standing corps

Frontex plays a crucial role in proper training and enforcing high common standards that are the foundation European Integrated Border Management (IBM). This role of the agency has become even more crucial as it trains the first members of the European Border and Coast Guard standing corps, Europe’s first uniformed law enforcement service. Frontex’s new and essential role is to ensure that standing corps officers are properly trained and have the technical and operational readiness to be deployed and operate in a unitary manner in any operational area generating added value.

At the same time, Frontex continues to support border and coast guards in their preparation for operational deployment at the EU external borders with cost-effective training solutions, a hybrid model of training and learning services offering delivery of training on a large scale as well as tailored to the specific operational and individual needs of border and coast guards before and during deployment.


Preparing the standing corps

Frontex providing members of the standing corps category 1 (Frontex statutory staff) the necessary border-guard or return-related training, including on fundamental rights, by way of the Basic Training Programme so that they are able to promptly respond to current and emerging challenges in a professional and interoperable manner.

It also provides specialisation trainings to all categories of the standing corps, tailored to the operational profiles for deployment and relevant to the tasks and powers in the field. The specialisation training is designed to enable the technical and operational readiness of the standing corps.


Strengthening the capacities of Member States

As part of its mission to strengthen the capacities of Member States and foster cooperation among border and coast guard training institutions, Frontex aligns its training of European border and coast guard officers with the operational needs according to operational profiles, using as central reference the Sectoral Qualifications Framework for Border Guarding, aligned to the European Qualifications Framework, integrated with the Coast Guard SQF and benchmarked with other existing sectoral frameworks in collaborative fields.

Frontex support the growth of Member States’ capacity in the area of border guarding by setting a common approach to EU border and coast guard training and education for developing and delivering a variety of harmonised programmes (Common Core Curricula (CCC-basic, CCC-mid-level management)), and the European Joint Master’s in Strategic Border Management. Frontex also provides specialised training programmes in core areas of Integrated Border Management to EU national authorities to enhance their border management capacities. The main topic areas covered by the programmes are Document and Identity Fraud, IBM (Course for IBM advisers), Situational Awareness, implementation of large scale IT systems for border management and Inter-agency Cooperation). A limited number of the specialised training programmes in core areas of IBM are available to be offered as technical assistance to non-EU partner countries in the context of the implementation of the Frontex mandate.