The presentation outlines the steps involved in constructing and validating a situational judgment test (SJT) designed to assess the decision-making skills of French prison administrators. The theoretical and methodological framework of SJTs will be reviewed and illustrated by the construction of this test. The principle of SJT items is to present a "problematic situation" and several response scenarios in the form of descriptions of behaviors that could be used to deal with the situation described. These tests have the dual advantage of being closer to the behaviors chosen in contextualized situations, which allows for a better assessment of skills than self-reported questionnaires (Lievens et al., 2008), while also allowing for psychometric standardization (Lothe et al., 2012). However, the construction of these tools requires a precise analysis of the activity and the conditions in which it is carried out, as well as a modeling of the processes involved in order to be able to assess professional performance (McDaniel et al., 2001, 2007). This study was conducted as part of the recruitment of candidates for the position of prison officer or prison director. In order to analyze the managerial activity of prison directors, we conducted observations and semi-structured interviews (17 individual interviews and 5 group interviews). Content and lexicometric analyses resulted in a model of managerial decision-making style criteria. This model was used to construct six items, each containing a "problem situation" scenario and a choice of four possible responses that correspond to the behaviors predicted by the model. Managerial competence requires controlling personal preferences and adopting the managerial behavior best suited to the situation. This test was taken by a sample of 105 students aiming for management positions in the French prison administration. The results enabled us to conduct construct validity and concurrent validity studies, which will be presented.