The digital competence of Chinese higher education students and the linkage with their career adaptability

PurposeRecently, digital competence has become one of the most important work competencies of employees. This study investigated students' digital competence in the context of Chinese higher education and examined digital competence's relationship with students' career adaptability.Design/methodology/approachThe participants were 298 Chinese higher education students from both universities and colleges. MANOVA (Multivariate Analysis of Variance) was carried out through SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) 26.0 to examine whether digital competence varied with the students' personal characteristics, i.e. gender, grade level and school type. In addition, the structural equation model was employed with Mplus 8.3 to analyse the relationship between digital competence and career adaptability as well as the mediation role of digital informal learning and academic performance.FindingsThe descriptive statistics revealed that students performed best in the safety construct, whilst worst in the digital content creation construct. The result of MANOVA showed that the digital competence of the participants significantly varied with participants' gender, school type and grade level. Furthermore, the structural equation model results demonstrated that higher education students' digital competence was positively associated with the students' career adaptability. And the mediation role of digital informal learning and academic performance was also confirmed.Originality/valueTo the authors' knowledge, this is the first study focussing on the relationship between digital competence and career adaptability. In particular, both working and learning perspectives were considered to explore this relationship. Besides, the authors also displayed Chinese higher education students' digital competence with consideration of different districts and school types.