Its no surprise those born after 1980, aka "millennial workers", are spending more time with social networking sites, IM and other collaborative technologies. The study finds, for example:

66 percent of millennials regularly access Facebook/MySpace vs. 13 percent of other workers. Seventy-five percent of millennials access their Webmail accounts vs. 54 percent of others. Forty-six percent of millennials use IM on the corporate network vs. 22 percent of others. For streaming video, photo sharing, and iTunes, there is a 20 percent difference for each, with the millennials at 38, 37, and 33 percent, respectively.

But there is also a dark side:

Less than half (45 percent) of millennials stick to company-issued devices or software as opposed to nearly 70 percent of other workers. And, 69 percent of millennials will use whatever application/device/technology they want, regardless of source or corporate IT policies (compared to 31 percent of others).

and

Three times as many millennials have downloaded software at work for personal use (75 percent vs. 25 percent).

Disregard for corporate policies emerges, I suspect, from either (a) a lack of understanding of the consequences of one's actions, in which case millennial workers have less understanding of IT, or (b) they have a more self-centric view of the world leads on to think one's needs/wants are more important than collective agreements about how to work together. Will millenial worker's attitudes change as they mature?

In any case, from a risk management perspective studies like this help to point out, at least at a very coarse grain level, areas fort targeting security awareness training.