Building Digital Confidence in Fashion Merchandising Education: Integrating Google Certifications with Experiential Learning

Preparing fashion merchandising students for the evolving digital landscape of the fashion industry is an educational challenge. This study investigated a potential solution to this challenge by integrating Google Digital Garage's certification with experiential activities. In a convergent parallel mixed-methods study, data were collected from 171 undergraduate students across five semesters to examine the effects of this curriculum on digital confidence, knowledge retention, knowledge transfer, and perceptions. From these findings, four contributions are presented. First, students had significant gains in confidence across all digital competencies, in contrast to declines reported in public relations and entrepreneurship education. Second, students’ known visual-creative orientation led to stronger performance on knowledge-transfer tasks than on traditional assessments. Third, a trilateral identity, as consumers, learners, and emerging professionals, emerged as a resource for meaning-making. Lastly, a framework, the Fashion Merchandising Digital Confidence Model (FMDM), is introduced to guide digital skills education in fashion merchandising programs.