You should know, once you get to a certain point and can talk the talk, recruiters will try to find jobs for you. They even try to do that for me. (probably older than many of you.)
I run into recruiters a lot - of all places, on the bus or train. I have a big stack of their business cards that I am collecting.
You should also make a calendar of maker events to go to. And become known at all your local hackerspaces.
But janoc is right - if I was looking for a 'real job' in electronics (I'm not) it would be hopeless without a degree in this job market.
One thing which nobody has touched on is career inertia. Basically that means that if you want your career to go forward you have to always be moving forward. At this stage of your life that means either diving deeply into some project your heart is telling you you can literally blow peoples minds with, or pursuing academic goals. Maybe not "the next big thing" or even close (start with attainable goals) but something you feel proud to be associated with and tell others about. Or starting your own business, "even if you are not expecting to make any money off of it". (Be realistic about the slim odds of success.)
Maybe building a website for your projects (putting your embedded devices online) would help you gel your ideas a bit.
There is a fun and still growing area, with a bright future, where you may be able to get your foot in the door, maybe you could specialize in building good, usable web UI's for embedded devices.
If you don't have some big project you can turn into a masterpiece, you should be getting a degree. If you don't have the first you really need the second.
When I think back to when I was your age, I was working in truly crap jobs and was feeling utterly miserable. I felt far older then than I do now, quite honestly.
But, I was meeting a lot of interesting people and learning how to use (partly by fixing) computers that I picked up on the street as junk. I learned some Unix and was connecting up to friends systems to get and send emails, which at that time were addressed using chains of exclamation points.
And I started hearing more and more about the Internet which was opening up to everybody. And an amazing social scene was occurring, where all sorts of ideas were exchanged. In many ways that was the most magical thing, because out of that cauldron so very many good ideas emerged. It was like the Renaissance.
That wouldn't happen in the America of today. But something else may happen (and its just as likely as not to be somewhere you're not) and you have to recognize it and get involved in it. There is no roadmap except your own intuition.
The world is a lot smaller than it must seem to you now. A lot smaller.