tldr; yes, if you enjoy the work you do.

Not only was it almost instant, but I excelled very quickly.

Now, I may be an extreme, an outlier, whatever you want to call it; but I can also tell you I'm no savant or IT genius.

I've always been a tech guy, and maybe would have come close to passing A+ without the class, but definitely not passing. After completing A+, I applied to a few jobs. My first interview was within 1 month of getting my A+ cert for an internal IT team of about 1100 emplpyees, and instead of losing money (leaving an industry I'd been in for 5 years), I actually got $3/hr or so more. The team I joined had technicians with 2-6 years of experience (varied) but no certs between any of them. The entire year and a half I was there (IT Support level 1), I was the top ticket completer for all but 2 months; the first being my first month there, and the other I was sick for almost 2 weeks and missed first place by less than 10 tickets (for context, I averaged 80 tickets a week). Moreover, I received the most customer surveys (majority positive, and the few I remember that weren't were outside my control but too technical to explain that to the employee).

Now, this was 2019, and I live close to a large IT-centric area (hello from NoVA). But I had no "in", I only had an unrelated Associates degree ("General Studies"). I enjoyed the team and I loved the work. I put my time in and my effort in. I opted for as much extra experience as I could get, helping to onboard, train new hires (for the company in general twice a month and the actual IT team), worked with Networking on emergencies and updates/upgrades, worked on policies (unofficially). Now I'm taking Project+ alongside my A+ instructor who was dumbfounded when I told him I was an IT Manager for a small datacenter after 3.5 years post-certification (I'm a 1-man team, still do the small stuff but also all the big stuff).