Parsons has come a long way since our start, in 1944. In that time, the world has witnessed people walking on the moon, the birth of the internet, the emergence of smart infrastructure, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and so much more. And Parsons was there through it all, achieving, innovating, and transforming the world as we transformed ourselves. In the ensuing decades, we’ve grown our capabilities, grown our company, and grown our impact in ways most observers couldn’t have predicted on day one.
Our founder, Ralph Parsons, said that the key to his company’s success would be to hire good people. The concept is simple in theory, but difficult in execution. Nevertheless, he pulled it off, getting the company off the ground with eight good people—six engineers, an administrative assistant, and himself—working out of an office in Los Angeles, California. The original intent was for Parsons to be operated as a small firm, but hiring good people resulted in even better success, and now, 80 years later, Parsons has evolved into a unique enterprise with a vibrant culture of more than 18,000 diverse, intelligent, talented people working around the globe to create the future of critical infrastructure and national security.
Because we’ve been involved in so many exciting individual projects, with more being added to the list all the time, it can be easy to lose perspective of the magnitude of Parsons’ impact on the world. Considering the enterprise more holistically, however, reveals a company whose capabilities and reach have resulted in landmark achievements and continue to produce endless possibilities throughout many growing markets.
Every day, as we’re innovating new solutions, people worldwide are riding on transit systems and driving on roads we engineered. They’re greeting family members at airports we helped imagine. They’re benefitting from our health research. They’re relying on our technological solutions to protect people, infrastructure, and information. They’re living in environments that we made cleaner.
Our record of stellar performance stretches from North America to the Middle East and from cyber space to outer space. Whether designing iconic bridges or smart giga-projects, transforming transportation or the battlespace, or shaping the ways we advance cyber operations or protect them, we’ve always worked to make the world smarter, safer, more connected, and more sustainable—and we always will.
Now, we’re celebrating Parsons 80th anniversary both as an achievement and as a launching point. Our accomplishments are not only milestones but steppingstones toward an even brighter future. With every project we undertake today, we’re not just solving current challenges; we’re anticipating those of tomorrow.
The day of our founding marked the beginning of not just a great company, but a great idea. An idea about what a group of talented people can do, how far they can take it, and what it can become. The whole roadmap may not have existed in 1944, but a clear path to success did—hiring good people with the vision to imagine next.