Your support for trainees and supervisors is essential if Frontline is to have maximum impact in your library.  It helps if you can give trainees a little flexibility in their work, and be prepared to listen constructively to some of their ideas, even if you have heard them before. You may need to encourage and support trainees to take a few risks, because doing Frontline asks trainees to experiment, and experiments sometimes fail.  Above all, noticing what your trainees are doing, and praising their efforts is central to them relaxing and enjoying the course - and getting the most out of it too.

Trainees will need access to a computer screen to read the course work, and enter the results and findings of their practical tasks in their online Learning Logs.   

They may need timetabled time to do that, and to prepare and undertake some of the practical tasks.  Most of the practical tasks can be done as part of everyday work – talking to borrowers, experimenting with making a visual impact with face on books and their reader to reader promotions for instance – and should not need extra time.

The work your staff do on Frontline may raise ideas which they will want to discuss with you, as well as their supervisor.  You could make time for this in regular meetings with them, or more formally as part of their personal development or review procedures.  You could liaise with the supervisor of trainees in your library to ask how things are going, and work together to monitor progress.

The course is judged on a competency model, rather than a pass or fail, but the judgments that supervisors are asked to make a specific and robust.  Trainees will be getting praise and criticism about their specific work on the course which may affect what they expect from you as a manager of their wider work practice.  Feedback on the course from the supervisor is given as two specific pieces of good work that the trainee has done, and one that they could improve, or take further.  This reflection happens at the end of every module.  If you detect that this is well done by the supervisor, and well received by the trainee, you could use it as a pattern for your future feedback to them too.

Finally, you can help by sending out the message that taking the course is not a race – trainees who all start at the same time may ‘fan out’ quite quickly – some getting on fast and others, for all sorts of reasons, taking longer to move on. 

If you have advice or feedback about the way the course is managed, your co-ordinator will want to hear it, so that they can apply your advice.  One of the jobs of the co-ordinator is to maintain the quality of learning, and monitor the running and impact of the course, so they will be interested in your views.