Hobbyist projects, competitions, and open source are real credentials
A traditional robotics or mechatronics degree is one path in, but it is far from the only one, and plenty of working roboticists got there through hands-on projects, competitions, and open-source contributions instead. Competitions like FRC and VEX are a genuinely strong feeder into the industry, not because of the trophy, but because they force you to design, build, wire, program, and debug a real physical system under a hard deadline, which is close to the actual job. Hiring managers who know these programs recognize that a multi-year FRC team lead has already done, in miniature, much of what a junior robotics engineer does day to day: iterating on a design that has to actually work, not just look good on paper. Hobbyist projects, building a walking robot, an autonomous rover, a robotic arm, on your own time serve a similar function, especially when you document the process, including the failures, since that documentation is what a resume alone cannot show.
Open-source robotics contributions, to projects like ROS packages, simulation tools, or hardware designs, are underrated as a way in because they are verifiable and public: anyone can look at your commits, see the problems you solved, and judge the quality of your work directly. This matters more in robotics than in many fields because so much of the work is genuinely hard to evaluate from a resume alone, a working contribution to a real, used piece of software says more than a bullet point ever could.