I’m afraid our paying jobs are all taken.
We can offer you a volunteer internship, though.
You won’t be paid, but you’ll learn lots of things.
Question: Is it okay to use “paid jobs” here?
What’s the difference between “paying jobs” and “paid jobs”?
Thank you!!!
I don’t think there is much of a difference here, you could say “I’m afraid our paid jobs are all taken”. In fact, to my hears it actually sounds better.
What is the difference? I’m not really sure. But consider these three sentences.
There are lots of jobs that pay well in the medical field.
There are lots of well paid jobs in the medical field.
There are lots of good paying jobs in the medical field.
In this example “paying jobs” is correct I’m pretty sure. It’s similar to looking up the “highest paying jobs in your expertise”. You can even try google searching on “highest paid jobs” and everything that comes up will be “highest paying jobs”. I’m not sure I can exactly explain the grammar and it may be ok to use “paid jobs”, in this particular example, but I’ve never heard it in this context and it doesn’t sound quite right to me. I think the reason being is that paying is more of a present situation whereas paid is used in the past. Michael has a good example though of saying “well paid” jobs. That mostly sounds ok to me. “well paying” jobs is good there, and might be a little better grammar wise, but I’m not 100% sure on that…
Jobs for which you get paid are ‘paid jobs.’ Jobs that pay are ‘paying jobs.’ So there’s really no difference; it’s just a matter of preference.
If you ask me, a job that doesn’t pay isn’t a job at all but an internship. But to differentiate between a job and an internship, people will refer to the job as a ‘paying job.’ A job that pays.
This is the use of the gerund as an adjective, like running water, a working knowledge, a living wage, mounting debt, breaking news.
There is no hard and fast rule, but if you can coherently describe the noun using the present tense, then it’s a safe bet that you can use the gerund-adjective .
A pool in which you can swim is a swimming pool.
Water that runs through a faucet is running water.
A job that pays is a paying job.
But:
A record that has been damaged or broken is a broken record.
It might not be a bad idea to start building a list of compound nouns that you come across which contain either gerunds or past participles as adjectives.