Digital Competence and Perceived Work Readiness: Exploratory Evidence from Selected Indonesian Vocational Hospitality Participants

Digital transformation is changing the competencies expected of hospitality graduates, requiring them not only to encounter industry technologies but also to use digital information, communicate through digital platforms, adapt to unfamiliar systems, and perform technology-supported tasks. This study explored the relationships among technology exposure, digital learning integration, digital competence, simulation-based learning, institutional support, perceived barriers, and perceived work readiness among participants from Indonesian vocational hospitality-related programmes. A quantitative-dominant exploratory mixed-methods design with an embedded qualitative component was employed. Quantitative survey data were obtained from 26 purposively selected participants and analysed using descriptive statistics, preliminary internal-consistency diagnostics, Spearman’s rank-order correlations, bootstrap confidence intervals, and sensitivity analysis. Qualitative data from four open-ended survey questions were analysed using content analysis to contextualise the quantitative patterns. Participants reported relatively high levels of perceived work readiness, digital competence, digital learning integration, simulation-based learning, and institutional support, alongside more uneven exposure to hospitality technologies. Participants reported greater exposure to digital payment systems, online booking platforms, guest-messaging applications, and property-management systems, while exposure to business-intelligence dashboards, channel-management systems, smart-room technologies, and service robots was more limited. Digital competence, institutional support, simulation-based learning, and digital learning integration showed comparatively larger positive associations with perceived work readiness, whereas technology exposure and perceived barriers showed smaller and less precisely estimated associations. Within digital competence, digital ethics received the highest ratings, while data literacy was comparatively weaker. Open-ended responses emphasised the need for more authentic technology practice, improved access to industry-relevant systems, stronger instructor guidance, and closer alignment between educational technology use and workplace practice. Given the small purposive sample, institutional concentration, cross-sectional design, and reliance on self-report measures, these findings should be interpreted as preliminary and should not be generalised to Indonesian hospitality students more broadly. The study provides an exploratory basis for distinguishing technology exposure, self-reported digital competence, and perceived work readiness as related but conceptually distinct aspects of digital preparation in vocational hospitality education.