Academic Engagement and Perceived Employability in Higher Education: A Systematic Review of Associations, Mechanisms, and Implications for Employability Development and Sustainable Career Research

Academic engagement and perceived employability are increasingly relevant to how higher education prepares students for changing labor markets, yet their empirical relationship remains theoretically and methodologically fragmented. This systematic review synthesized primary studies that substantively examined both constructs among higher education students. Reporting followed PRISMA 2020. The original Scopus and Web of Science searches were expanded during peer review to ERIC, APA PsycINFO, Education Source, and ProQuest, and one-generation backward and forward citation searching was completed. Across all sources, 627 raw records were consolidated, 119 duplicates were removed, 508 unique records were screened, 17 full texts were assessed, and 14 studies met the eligibility criteria. Evidence was synthesized narratively because study designs, measures, modeled directions, and statistical metrics were not sufficiently comparable for meta-analysis. Twelve studies were cross-sectional and two were longitudinal or time-lagged. The evidence was predominantly consistent with a positive association between engagement and perceived employability, but effect magnitude, dimensional patterns, modeled direction, and explanatory mechanisms varied. Engagement frequently operated as a mediator linking educational, relational, or psychological resources with employability perceptions, whereas several studies modeled perceived employability as an antecedent of engagement. JBI appraisal indicated generally adequate measurement and statistical analysis but recurrent limitations in explicit confounding control and temporal inference. The findings support a cautious, mechanism-oriented interpretation: academic engagement and perceived employability are related, but causal ordering remains unresolved. Future research should prioritize longitudinal, reciprocal, dimension-sensitive, multi-source, and cross-context designs and directly measure sustainable career outcomes rather than treating perceived employability as a proxy for career sustainability.