With difficulty, but got there in the end.
My education and first seven or so years of working life were all in IT, and in particular in software development related fields.
However as the internet was starting to really take off (1997 or around that time) I got interested in internet marketing. I think the idea of making a good living from home really appealed, and everyone seemed to be making money online, so why not me!
So while keeping my job, I studied online marketing in the evenings. In particular, I found the mental transition from IT to marketing quite difficult.
It's a huge subject, and a completely different way of thinking about things. I think you can often see that in comments here, when people focus more on the technical aspects of a marketing challenge/problem, rather than the marketing and sales aspect that actually generates the business growth.
(For example - if you're getting leads from Facebook at a cost that makes sense to you, and you're converting those leads into valuable clients, obsessing over click fraud is a waste of time and energy. IMO. Focusing on optimising your marketing, rather than the technical challenge of trying to track down click bots, is a far more productive use of your time, and your business will thank you for it.)
There's a lot more information available on marketing now of course, and there's a lot of overlap between the marketing and technical aspects (AdTech for example). But it's still two very different ways of thinking about things, and if you're too technology or data driven in marketing you can often miss the wood for the trees, and you may be ignoring people's "feelings" as abstract as that sounds, and feelings are what actually drive sales. So taking a step back from the data, and really understanding your market and how they make buying decisions, can be hugely beneficial.
So the transition took a long time, and after a few years (a lot of dabbling, only really getting serious the last year or two) I made the move into online marketing full time (running my own sites...etc.) and slowly over time my income grew. Then moved into consulting with clients, and then into starting and running an agency.
Now I have found having a technical background has been very helpful in many aspects of online marketing, but now my attention is fully focused on marketing and my business, and if a technical challenge would require a significant investment of my time, it generally makes the most sense to my business to outsource that. So being specialised and focused on business results, rather than trying to be good at everything.
So to answer your question - yes, I made the transition. It took a long time, and a new way of thinking. But it certainly paid off.