Content User Profile: Students Today, Knowledge Workers Tomorrow

Young people exhibit a different set of content use behaviors, traits, and preferences than their older counterparts. Content vendors and deployers can look to these young users to gain insights about what the future holds. Today's college students and young professionals are tomorrow's decision-makers and content buyers, and everyone in the Information Industry can benefit by understanding users' emerging traits and preferences.In this Briefing, Outsell continues its series of user profiles, taking a look at what we can predict about tomorrow's buyers and decision-makers by examining the profiles of today's young content users. Based on Outsell's database of user profiles, it unearths quantitative differences between age segmentations and takes age-related observations from the realm of tacit assumptions to actionable, fact-based data. The Briefing identifies growing expectations of independence and convenience in information-seeking. It also confirms that physical libraries are still very much a part of college students' research process. Younger corporate information users have the strongest affinity for the open Web as their preferred starting point for research. For commercial content vendors, the Briefing's implications include an increasing need for on-demand training and contextual help in order to support self-reliant users. For content deployment professionals, the coming generation will cause a shift from 'gatekeeper' to 'research facilitator' roles.