There's a particular kind of question you ask yourself at a certain point in a career — not "what do I want to do next?" but "what do I actually want to understand?" For me, that question arrived somewhere between designing my fortieth course and sitting in a feedback session where a client said, "This was great, but I'm not sure anything really changed." That moment stayed with me longer than it should have.
I'd been working in instructional design and client training for years by then. I was good at it. I understood the frameworks, I could navigate stakeholders, I knew how to build content that people would actually sit through. What I didn't have was a rigorous answer to the harder question: why does any of it work, and how would I know when it doesn't?
That's what pointed me toward doctoral study. Not a credential. Not a title. An honest reckoning with the limits of what I knew and a decision to do something about it.