Abstract: Project managers play a fundamental role in project success and organizational strategy implementation. With the increasing scale and complexity of construction projects, the demand for qualified project managers is also growing. This paper develops a model for identifying the managers’ key competences that need further improvement, so as to support personal development and organizational human resource management practices. Based on the previous competence indicator system in the literature, a questionnaire survey was conducted to obtain the importance and performance of each competence. Importance-performance analysis (IPA) is adopted to identify competences in need of improvement; a priority order of them is then determined through calculation of the priority index of each competence. Case analysis shows our model is effective and easy to use in identifying and ranking the construction project managers’ competences. It helps identify the key competences for improvement and establish corresponding competence building strategies, and our modified IPA method is also a useful tool that can be applied to other similar studies.

Key words: construction project manager, key competence element, importance-performance analysis, competences identification model, human resource management