Tips for online portfolio/portfolio projects?

I recently was laid off and now I'm planning on using some of my free time building an online portfolio. I've done analytics for years for various B2B SaaS companies. I figure working on some side projects would help fulfill the dual purpose of 1) building an online portfolio and 2) continuing to upskill. For context, I'm very adept at data viz and data analysis. Obviously, it's harder to shower confidential data from my past jobs in a public portfolio so I thought it'd be fun to work on some kaggle datasets. However some questions? is it worth it? Or is it just a distraction from my actual jo