How do I transition to legit freelancing, coming from a background of unethical projects?

Question

I am a recent electronics engineering graduate, currently legally working as an embedded software engineer in a company.

In the future, I would like to become a freelancer, like signing up on a freelancing website and getting hired to do real projects.

Currently, as a side/weekend gig, I help engineering students with their diploma projects. It's obviously illegal but it's a very common practice around here. But frankly, it's a great opportunity for me to earn good money and learn my trade with real hands-on experience.

In the future, when looking for real customers, they will likely ask for a portfolio of my work. What am I going to show them? Some diploma projects of random people that I supposedly made? I'm afraid that would look very unprofessional.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 03 '19 at 12:02

If you in the USA there are couple of good ways to start building a profile.

Volunteer at your local FIRST robotics team. This is good place to get started learning new skills and using current skills
Be an active member of the communities such as engineering stackexchange where you can start building an online profile of you skills. You can asked embedded engineering type of question as well as answer engineering questions.
You can contribute to open source projects, through platforms such as github.
Solving a problem such as Which kind of accelerometer/vibration sensor are suitable for sensing vibration of building floor caused by human foot strike? in open source platform help build a technical profile.
Sharing you solutions via platform such as youtube, or other social media platform can help build a technical profile.
Par Scholas is great place to volunteer to share your technical skills, learn new skills and a build a technical project portfolio
Turing School of Software and Design is another good place to start building a technical profile.

References:

How do I transition to legit freelancing, coming from a background of unethical projects?

1 Answers1