Expert, witness, or stakeholder inquiry

Ask someone with direct competence or firsthand experience, using structured questions rather than casual chat.

You're seriously considering leaving your industry to teach, and so far your research consists of articles, salary tables, and one enthusiastic movie about an inspiring teacher. What you don't have is ten minutes with anyone who has actually made this exact move and lived inside the result for a few years.

Expert, witness, or stakeholder inquiry is the contact move of asking someone with direct competence or firsthand experience, using structured questions rather than casual chat. The structure matters because casual conversation drifts toward stories the teller enjoys, while your decision needs specific territory covered. The cue is a decision where the crucial knowledge lives in people, not documents: what a transition actually feels like, what practitioners know that never gets written down. The operation: identify two or three people with genuinely direct experience (career changers into teaching, five-plus years in), prepare questions aimed at your real uncertainties ("what surprised you most in year two?", "what do you miss?", "who should not make this move?"), and ask each person independently so one voice doesn't anchor the others. Weight answers by directness of experience, and notice where independent accounts converge. What changes is that your decision absorbs lived knowledge no article contains. Skip the inquiry when documents already answer the question more reliably than recollection can.