First of all realize that with any job you need to have a bit of luck but still better you need to have a lot of passion/interest.
And realize there are actually few company's in Europe who do their own design (compared to the amount of "service" jobs) but they do exist.
If you want to have a job in electronics then don't ask what you need to know to get a job, know stuff first and then try to get a job.
Do your daily work and at home mess around, start building stuff, start designing stuff.
Go dumpster diving in a business park where there is a electronics repair facility and dragg stuff in the house and take it apart, try to figure out what it is, how it's made, what you can do with those components.
Pass there during the day and ask kindly to someone who doesn't wear tie if he works in the repair section and if so if you can get some stuff they throw away.
Start small, buy a decent multimeter, decent set of screwdrivers, make your self a good powersupply (or assemble a kit), get a breadboard and make bunch of 555 stuff. Or "old" 4000 /74xxxx circuits. Buy "the art of electronics". Play around in emulators like SPICE and muck around in general (watch out for mains...). Watch eevblog...
Design yourself stuff like an Arduino board PCB from scratch just to see if you can. Fail to do so. Cheat by looking how they did it (it's opensource). try again.
Don't be foolish and expect this to happen overnight. It will take 1 year, 2 years... more.
Participate in/read/follow opensource hardware things like the beagleboard and nanonote.
Read. Ask. Read again. Screw up. Blow stuff up. Try again. Don't forget to have fun.
THEN after that try to figure out if there are any jobs on the market you might actually like.
And if you don't have a degree in electronics (or even if you do) then reference/experience is everything.
But the only way to get experience is to know stuff so that if something comes along you can say "Hey I can do that..." without flatout lying and getting kicked out by a dave asking you basic stuff.
Don't lie where you come from, autodidacts are one of the rear breads of "engineers" who have one big advantage, they already show they comprehend stuff unlike a lot of people who have a degree but have no real clue what they talk about.
If the compay you are soliciting does not get that then it basically means you don't want to work there.
Greetz and Godspeed
(and yes I'm an autodidact myself - now working as a product specialist in one of the biggest software company's in the world. Electronics is now my "hobby".. and who knows, one day...)