大庆职业学院（Daqing Vocational College）位于黑龙江省大庆市，是黑龙江省一所以石油石化类专业为特色的全日制专科层次高等职业学校，是国家示范性高等职业院校。学院前身可追溯至1953年成立的松江省财经干部学校，后历经演进与调整，于2001年3月8日经黑龙江省人民政府批准、教育部备案，由大庆石油学校、大庆职工大学、大庆人民警察学校、大庆艺术学校组建成立大庆职业学院。2011年，入选国家示范性高等职业院校。截至2018年12月，学院占地面积187.18万平方米；设有6个系和2个教学部，开设36个高职专科专业；有专任教师278人，在校生2480人。
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.
