Employers asking for my portfolio of web design/development work

That sounds great Andrew!

It's good to know that there's someone out there who's facing the same dilemma as I am facing.

My main problem is that how do I know which project ideas that I'm going to come up with, will be the ones the employers may be asking for when reviewing your work and judging your best skillsets in building great web apps?

I'll take a look at oDesk and see what real world problems I can do to solve!

Well fortunately I got about a year plus experience of doing web/software development work now.. So that should help me a lot of growing skillsets further. But the job I was working on got nothing to do with setting up applications on your portfolio. The work I did was purely an enterprise business system so it's not available publicly for general public to view.

I just to get more training like Teamtreehouse to get my skillsets further ahead.

By real companies, you're not just restricted to commercial companies are you? What about charity organisations? Maybe those are good candidate for delivering mockup projects?

I got some good networking skills thus I think I will use to network many commercial companies in tech-startup industry and see which of them has some genuine problems I'd be happy to offer innovate solutions and create long term for them, and (eventually) land myself a dream with one of them as well.

Any real organization would be great. You might consider doing some stuff for free. For instance, I built a complete wordpress site for a buddy of mine who owns a small fitness training center here locally. I built the site 100% for free, with the tradeoff that I can use that in my portfolio. Being in the same boat as you, having a real, living, breathing project in my portfolio was more important to me than the money.

Eventually, you'll get tired of doing stuff for free, and at that point, you should have enough portfolio pieces to back up your fees for your work.

As another example, I created a whole advertising campaign for GoPro cameras. Created a theme, and made several print and digital ads based off a theme. They look real, but of course they are not. That will eventually go into my portfolio too.

Anything you can do to help potential employers or clients associate the work you have done with being real, will help them draw a connection how you can truly help solve their problems. Remember, at the core, you are a creative problem solver, and your employer or client has a problem they need solved. Go solve as many problems as you can, record those solutions, and now you have a portfolio.

If you take a company that is pretty well know for say, and identify some issues with their UI, UX, design

This sounds like you are promoting unsolicited redesigns. This bit offers some great advice on those:

The issue with most unsolicited redesigns that are published is that the goal is not to solve problems...it's to make it look "better".

source: http://branch.com/b/unsolicited-redesigns

Also this article is worth a read:

http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/blog/keep-your-unsolicited-redesign-to-yourself/

There were some good points made. Truth be told, I never thought of the point the idea of "I can do better", or in the example in that article, a complete redesign of Facebook. I've always looked at a design like storytelling; If you can't tell a story in your project, what the hell are you designing it for?

I certainly think working with and for real clients for little to no money to build a portfolio is always best, since you get the experience of working with real people. I'll still likely leave my projects as I have them planned to be included, but if anything the article has certainly given me some perspective to think and re-think my approach, so I do not end up being "one of those" designers.

They mostly show off technical skills like photoshop or CSS. They aren't really designs per se as they entirely miss the concept of UX. A more proper term for them would be front end dev practice, they have more in common with re-creating an existing site for CSS practice than they do with solving any actual problems.

They do show off skills just not design skills.

That makes sense. My background comes from product or industrial design, where I think this is less of a concern. I guess in my world it would be like taking a chair design from Herman Miller and just re-creating or re-skinning it; without addressing any possible ergonomic or material issues. Again, very interesting discussion that revolving around the web world.

which by the way, I'm NOT saying I Herman Miller chairs have these sorts of issues. I highly respect his work as a designer; it's inspiring. It was just the first example that came to mind.