[1] Parsons took a job as a civil engineer for a railroad located in Western Massachusetts upon graduation but he lost this position when the firm collapsed amidst the Panic of 1873.

[1] After relatively brief stints as a common laborer and a public school teacher, Parsons decided to go into the legal profession, preparing for the Massachusetts bar examination for one year before taking and passing the exam in 1881.

[1] Unfortunately, Parsons experienced a health failure shortly after passing the bar exam and found himself compelled to move the New Mexico Territory in search of recovery.

It was a time of great disparity between wealthy plutocrats, often exercising monopoly power over the economy through organized associations called trusts, and a frequently impoverished working class, racked by periodic depressions such as the 1873 event which had cost Parsons his first job.

[4] In December 1895, Parsons ran for Mayor of Boston,[5] as the candidate for the Municipal Reform Party—"a fusion of prohibitionists, labor, populists, and socialists".

[4] In addition to his prolific work for The Arena, Parsons was named a contributing editor to the social democratic monthly The American Fabian in 1896.

In 1906, he was commissioned by the National Civic Federation to travel to Great Britain to study the incidence of municipal ownership and its outcomes in that country.

[3] In 1907, he submitted plans for a Vocation Bureau which would be open not only to the members of the Civic Service House where he volunteered, but to all who wished to come for help in their life-work problems.

[12] The posthumous publication in 1911 of Parson's manuscript, Choosing a Vocation, and its so-called "talent-matching approach" proved to be massively influential with a generation of educationalists.