Career Competencies and Job Market Readiness: The Role of Career Self-Management and Labor Market Uncertainty

Preparing graduates to navigate increasingly uncertain labor markets is an important challenge for higher education and the broader pursuit of sustainable graduate employability. Although higher education institutions invest substantially in developing Career Competencies (CC), comparatively less is known about how these competencies are associated with graduates’ Job Market Readiness (JMR), the role of Career Self-Management (CSM) in this relationship, and whether perceived Labor Market Uncertainty (LMU) conditions the strength of this association. Drawing on Human Capital Theory, Career Construction Theory, and Conservation of Resources Theory, this study develops and empirically examines an integrated framework linking developmental resources, self-regulatory career behavior, employment readiness, and perceived labor market conditions. Data were collected from 398 final-year university students and recent graduates in Saudi Arabia using a non-probability, multi-institutional purposive sampling approach and analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 27, AMOS 27, and Hayes’ PROCESS macro. The findings show that CC was positively associated with both CSM and JMR, while CSM was also positively associated with JMR. The analysis further identified a significant indirect statistical association between CC and JMR through CSM, along with a remaining significant direct association. In addition, perceived LMU significantly moderated the CC–JMR relationship, such that the positive association was stronger at higher levels of perceived uncertainty. These findings contribute to graduate employability research by showing that the employment relevance of Career Competencies is associated not only with the resources graduates possess but also with their Career Self-Management and the labor market conditions they perceive. Therefore, sustainable graduate employability is treated as a broader theoretical implication of these relationships rather than an outcome directly measured by this study. These findings provide a basis for future longitudinal research examining whether these associations contribute to more sustainable education-to-work transitions over time.