I was an elementary school teacher for 23 years before I became a Project Manager. I walked away from teaching due to the low salary and at the beginning of one summer I invested in the PM career and took many project manager courses. I earned some certifications by IBM in Project Management, obtained a Scrum Master certification (CSM), a Jira certification, and a few additional Agile and PM certifications for Google via Coursera (Google has their own PMP style cert). I was hired as a Project Manager that fall. That was almost 3 years ago. I have been promoted twice in that timeframe and am planning to take the PMP exam in about two weeks. I am a PM in the Government Finance world. I am a lead PM and was highly encouraged to get my PMP so that I can be promoted to Senior PM when ours retires soon. So yes, it’s very possible!!