The Effect of Digital Literacy on Career Adaptability Competence among Final-Year Students: The Mediating Roles of Self-Efficacy and Learning Motivation

The rapid digitalization of the global labor market has intensified demands for graduates who possess not only technical digital competencies but also the psychological capacity to adapt to dynamic and uncertain career environments. Despite growing recognition of digital literacy as a key employability driver, the psychological mechanisms through which it translates into career adaptability remain underexplored, particularly in Indonesian higher education. Grounded in Career Construction Theory (CCT), this study investigates the direct effect of digital literacy on career adaptability competence and examines the parallel mediating roles of self-efficacy and learning motivation. A quantitative cross-sectional survey was conducted with final-year undergraduate management students at a private university in Jakarta using PLS-SEM. Results confirmed that digital literacy positively and significantly affects career adaptability both directly and indirectly through learning motivation and self-efficacy, with both mediators demonstrating complementary partial mediation and learning motivation emerging as the more dominant pathway. These findings extend CCT by positioning digital literacy as a psychologically generative antecedent of career adaptability resources and offer practical implications for curriculum design and career development programming in the digital era.