A Strategic Review of Career Guidance for Digital Art Students in the AI Era

Abstract

The rapid integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the expansion of digital visual culture are fundamentally reshaping the creative labor market, creating an urgent need for redefined career guidance (CG) frameworks tailored to digital art students. This study addresses a critical structural mismatch between traditional arts education historically focused on aesthetic sensibility and manual craftsmanship and contemporary industry demands for hybrid competencies, including computational thinking, digital fluency, and technological collaboration. This gap is further intensified by the limitations of conventional digital job platforms, which inadequately support the portfolio-based and freelance nature of creative work, thereby constraining Job Search Efficacy (JSE).
Adopting a narrative review approach, this study synthesizes interdisciplinary literature to examine the transformation of creative skills in the AI era, identify key determinants of JSE (personal, social, and technological), and evaluate emerging career guidance models. The findings indicate that JSE is shaped by the interaction of self-efficacy, social support systems, and adaptive digital literacy, yet existing frameworks remain insufficiently aligned with the realities of creative labor markets.
The study contributes by integrating AI driven skill transformation, career guidance, and employability into a unified conceptual perspective specific to digital art education. It argues that effective CG must transition toward a proactive, technology-integrated model that embeds AI literacy, ethical critique, and personalized systems such as the Career and Educational Guidance System (CEGS), alongside context-specific digital training. Such transformation is essential for developing adaptive and critically engaged creative professionals in the AI-driven economy