and skill areas outlined in Section 2 and Section 3
were decomposed into several elements that impact on
competency of project managers. These elements de®ne
isolated knowledge and skills (kÿs) that are usually
oered in training modules for developing and main-
taining project management competency. The survey
elicited for each kÿs element the degree of importance
for developing and maintaining PM competency. Each
kÿs element was evaluated for a kÿs factor. The
rationale of the kÿs factor is to identify the critical
knowledge and skill areas for developing project man-
agement competency in construction determined by the
wider perception of the construction industry. The per-
ceived level of importance for each element was estab-
lished by applying equation 1.
k ÿ s factor 100*Sxifi=
xmax*Sfi
1
where: i takes on a value between 1 and 5 based on
the adopted nominal scale; xi represents discrete cat-
egories of scaled respondent attitudes; xmax represents
the maximum value of xi; fi represents the frequency
for each category of xi; Sfi represents the total sample
size for each kÿs element.
The kÿs factor values ranged between 100 and 0,
with higher values indicating a greater degree of im-
portance. The analysis extracted two categories of kÿs
elements, the primary and the secondary ones. The
survey also established the extent to which the dierent
modes of acquiring such PM competency were relevant