Aspirations, Perceptions, and Reality: Examining the Role of the Learning Experience on University Students’ Perceived Employability

Perceived employability is increasingly recognized as a core component of individuals’ capacity to build sustainable careers: occupational trajectories that remain viable, meaningful, and adaptive across the working lifespan. Within the broader framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), higher education institutions play a strategic role in equipping students with the psychological resources needed for a successful and sustainable transition from education to employment. This study examined the university learning experience in relation to perceived employability, testing college satisfaction as a mediator between two key academic dimensions, good teaching and university commitment, and students’ occupational self-perception. A sample of 179 students (59.2% female; Mage = 24.40, SD = 5.95) enrolled at the University of Palermo completed self-report measures of all four constructs. A mediation model was tested on composite scale scores, with indirect associations estimated through bias-corrected bootstrapping (5000 resamples). Good teaching (b = 0.332, β = 0.338, p < 0.001) and university commitment (b = 0.250, β = 0.247, p = 0.001) were both positively associated with college satisfaction, accounting for 26.3% of its variance; college satisfaction, in turn, was positively associated with perceived employability (b = 0.258, β = 0.396, p < 0.001), with the full model accounting for 32.8% of the variance in perceived employability. College satisfaction fully accounted for the association between teaching quality and perceived employability, and partially accounted for the association between university commitment and perceived employability. These findings point to a consistent conclusion: a satisfying and supportive academic experience is not a peripheral feature of university life, but a key process through which students develop a confident sense of their own occupational potential. For universities, this translates into concrete levers, namely teaching quality and institutional belonging, that can meaningfully support students’ long-term and resilient integration into the labor market, while contributing more broadly to the sustainability of the higher education-to-work pipeline.