A senior director at Oracle likely had enough money to be able to afford to take classes while not working (and not going into debt), get an apprenticeship (mandatory for electricians) working for peanuts, and then spend a bunch of money on advertising and/or leverage all his business contacts (as everyone, especially the wealthy, need electricians at some point.) He could afford to pay $$$ for all the electrical code books that non-master-electricians are required to memorize (and pass tests on.) He likely didn't have to worry about health insurance, wasn't carrying any debt, had a reliable car, etc.

Dear everyone in this discussion: stop pretending like people working Amazon Warehouse jobs can just switch gears, and especially stop citing examples of rich, educated, privileged people doing it as "proof" it can be done.

It's pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps nonsense. These sorts of jobs are so physically demanding that you end up exhausted at the end of a shift and there's not much energy for other things unless you're pretty young....and unlike wealthy connected people, they don't have the personal/professional network.

I don't think you "get" what I was trying to say. I had mentioned a actual person - this was a woman and not a man btw(I mentioned that, I guess you didn't read my post close enough), who moved out of a engineering director position and was now a electrician. They don't own their own electrical business, they are just another electrician on the job. And yes they probably are very wealthy but wanted to switch careers like the author of this post and really enjoyed going into manual labor and getting out of tech. I don't know what else there is to argue about?

I used to do landscaping. One morning I pulled my then-girlfriend out of bed by the legs because I was dreaming about dragging a tree into a hole. I moved a lot of heavy trees and shrubs in that job. Haha, memories!