The impact of AI anxiety on career decisions of college students

Synthesis: AI anxiety and career decisions — a structural equation modeling study of 315 Chinese college students (grounded in Career Construction Theory) showing that AI anxiety directly and negatively predicts career decisions, and also exerts an adverse indirect effect by undermining career adaptability — with the mediating effect accounting for 63.35% of the total effect. However, the moderating effect of Self-Efficacy was insignificant, indicating limited buffering capacity.

Duan, Li, Lin, & Chen (2026) provide direct empirical evidence that career-related AI anxiety — fear of job displacement, diminished employability, and skill obsolescence — impairs students' career confidence, goal clarity, and decision-making. This is a core empirical anchor for the Career Development and Readiness concept's link to Anxiety and Stress.

Method

• Sample: 315 Chinese college students via questionnaire survey.
• Design: Structural equation modeling (SEM) grounded in Career Construction Theory.
• Mechanism tested: AI anxiety → career decisions, with career adaptability as mediator and self-efficacy as moderator.

Key Findings

• AI anxiety negatively predicts career decisions — directly and significantly.
• Career adaptability mediates: AI anxiety undermines career adaptability, which in turn harms career decisions; this indirect pathway accounts for 63.35% of the total effect.
• Self-efficacy did not buffer: the moderating effect of self-efficacy was insignificant, indicating limited buffering capacity — anxiety's harm to career decisions is not easily offset by self-belief alone.
• Career decision is multidimensional: encompassing career confidence, goal clarity, knowledge satisfaction, and choice preparedness — all vulnerable to AI anxiety.

What this means for practice

• Instructors. Teach career adaptability directly, through planned curricula and practical career-planning experiences, because it carried 63.35% of AI anxiety's adverse effect on career decisions — the single largest lever available.
• Administrators. Universalize AI Literacy and career-planning courses and deepen industry–education integration, so students build decision-making capability before AI anxiety erodes it.
• Faculty developers. Favor skill-building over confidence-raising: the null moderation result shows that general career self-efficacy does not buffer students against a systemic threat like AI, so programs that only raise self-belief will not close the gap.
• Researchers. Measure career decisions against behavioral criteria — internship applications, career workshop attendance, job offers, and time to employment — because attitudinal scales alone cannot show whether anxiety changes what students actually do.

Limitations

• The 315 valid questionnaires (65.6% response rate) came from three universities in a single city (Baise City, Guangxi), so the findings generalize cautiously to elite institutions or economically developed coastal regions.
• The cross-sectional survey supports no causal claim and captured no external behavioral criteria; career preparedness and goal clarity were measured, not actual job search behavior or employment.
• Career adaptability and career decision self-efficacy showed insufficient discriminant validity (HTMT = 0.92), so the null moderation finding may reflect overlapping measurement rather than a genuinely absent effect.
• Reliance on self-reported, partly short-form scales — including an adapted measure of AI-triggered anxiety rather than a validated AI anxiety inventory — may have underestimated the true relationships.

Citation

Duan, N., Li, L., Lin, G., & Chen, H. (2026). The impact of AI anxiety on career decisions of college students. Scientific Reports, 16, 37648.