Usually, the graduate students start looking for jobs after graduation or further studies to continue their career development and progression.
The common route for those who want to go to work is to apply to job advertisements and go through interviews and jump over years from one recruiter to another.
To increase employability chances and bring awareness about other routes, Dr Walid Issa introduced how to Freelancing and demonstrated one of the successful examples. This will increase the potential talented engineers who might be interested to kickstart their own business.
Dr. Issa delivered a workshop to Electrical and Electronic Engineering Students at Sheffield Hallam University about the Freelancing concept and how to exploit the knowledge and skills in a different way from the known routes.
To be a freelancer, it is required to position yourself in a competitive position among other tens or hundreds of engineers and equip yourself with high skills and knowledge to avoid many iterations of a product or service provision.
Dr. Issa elaborated on how to use your power electronics knowledge and skills to develop a market product. For example, Dr. Issa demonstrated how he developed the TikStation board which is a mini power station board that has 5 independent outputs of voltages and can supply up to 1.5A loads. This board can be supplied by USB adaptors or batteries. A photo of the product is shown below. His product is motivated by high priced single-output power supplies that the students might use during their learning or development, especially at-home learning.
After targeting a market need and finalizing a prototype that requires some time and money investment, its time to convert it to a market product with mass production but that might need a higher budget.
One route to do this is using the crowdfunding websites and Issa has used KickStarter website to market his product and secure more than 400 pre-orders. That fund enables him to kickstart a business “TikStation”.
He also shared his product for sale on Tindie for the hardware community. This product will support other businesses or educational institutes to enable easier access to learning resourcing by using this kit.
The students showed a high impression about how what they learnt already is enough to start such a journey.