About Erick L. Sokn

I grew up on a working farm in rural Illinois, served as a U.S. Army Military Policeman, worked in the trades and as a structural ironworker, and later spent more than three decades in engineering, product development, manufacturing, and engineering leadership.

The work was different from one stage to the next, but many of the same habits carried through: understand what is really happening, pay attention to what is slightly off, break difficult problems into manageable pieces, make the best decision the available evidence allows, and own the outcome.

Throughout my engineering career, I used an approach that integrated structured problem solving and the physics of failure with experience across product development, manufacturing, material selection, tooling, and processing. I eventually organized that into a comprehensive product development approach that, in various forms, was taught and applied at two of the companies where I worked over a period spanning more than twenty years. That approach and training became the foundation for the Engineering Product Development Curriculum presented on this site.

Writing followed a different path. Poetry was a creative outlet early in my life, and several poems were published in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but as family responsibilities grew and my engineering career expanded, I largely set writing aside. When I semi-retired a few years ago, I began writing again. What started with stories my daughter asked me to write down gradually grew into a completed book, while my return to poetry led to new poems and a full poetry collection. The current poems and poetry collection are being considered for publication by several journals and presses, and an essay drawn from those stories was published by The Wrath-Bearing Tree.

Today, I continue to develop the engineering curriculum and technical reference materials on this site, take on selected engineering consulting work, and write.