ERIC Number: EJ1441575
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Oct
Pages: 12
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0950-4222
EISSN: EISSN-2043-6858
Digital Career Competencies: A Co-Created Scale for the Digital Employability Competencies We've Overlooked
Margarietha de Villiers Scheepers; Rory Mulcahy; David Fleishman; Peter English; Jacqueline Burgess; Gail Crimmins
Industry and Higher Education, v38 n5 p411-422 2024
The digital economy with flexible work contexts requires graduates to enter the workplace with digital skills. While studies have examined digital literacy and skills within domains, attending to knowledge, workplace, business and digital skills, these narrow definitions overlook the importance of digital career competencies for lifelong career management. This paper reports on measures of digital career competencies (DCC) and how the dimensionality of these measures might enable universities, students, and other stakeholders to ascertain how these competencies develop. Using a pragmatic, co-created, three-study design, initial dimensions and a pool of measurement items were developed qualitatively, involving responses from 22 alumni. These items and their dimension reliability were then tested with n = 202 students, and further evaluated using a second sample of n = 156 students. The results demonstrate that DCC can be assessed using three dimensions: digital connectedness, career management, and crowdworking. The developed 8-item, three-dimension scale exhibited sound reliability and validity. The novel co-design method for measure development, and the research findings, provide theoretical and practical contributions to emerging empirical research on DCC. These measures provide a parsimonious base for assessing DCC and facilitating the development of these competencies in higher education.
Descriptors: Career Development, College Graduates, Alumni, Digital Literacy, Job Skills, Business Skills, Job Sharing, Competence
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2993
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A