Learn English – I have worked in/at/within (the) x industry for a while

prepositions

I would like to ask which preposition should be used with the word industry in an example as follows.

I have worked at/ in / within the tourism industry for a while.

Is the necessary or does it add extra meaning to the sentence?

Best Answer

According to Google Ngram Viewer, in is far more common in print than within, and at doesn't register as used at all:

in the industry versus within the industry versus at the industry

Industry is both a countable noun and a mass noun, but tourism is only a mass noun and cannot be counted.

As such, the following breaks down what's grammatical and what's ungrammatical:

✔ I worked in the tourism industry.
✔ I worked in a tourism industry.
✔ I worked in the industry.
✔ I worked in an industry.
✔ I worked in industry.
✔ I worked in tourism.

✘ I worked in the tourism.
✘ I worked in a tourism.
✘ I worked in tourism industry.

Note that the error of last sentence doesn't logically follow from the syntactic use of industry as a mass noun and tourism as an attributive noun; however, it's simply not idiomatic.

Also note that the grammatical sentences don't all have the same meaning.

If you're talking about the tourism industry in general, which would be more normal than not, using the is the most common way of expressing that.

In short, the following is the most common phrase:

I worked in the tourism industry for a while.

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