Using (only or almost only) your own (personal possession) laptop for work

[MedSchoolRat]

Do you?
I am junior staff in STEM research, not able to be a budget holder.
I have an old work laptop no one will replace. Some office-mates, and my line managers only use private laptops for Uni research. They bought with personal money, do all admin for. Yes they may not be IT-secure, GDPR etc. compliant but it's cost and employer-should-provide equipment principle rather than security that discourages me doing same. One colleague says it's near universal practice by faculty (to use their own not Uni-supplied computers) in his department. It sounds like they use University computers very little if at all. This way they control updates, install software how they like, security policies, can quickly fix IT issues, get high spec they like, etc.

I'm curious how common this (own not Uni computer as main machine) is in academia outside my institution.
Thanks.

During lockdown our place handed out laptops to all staff that wanted them to enable them to work remotely. Before that you either used your grant money if you had access or went without and used your own- which is a situation we're returning to now

I didn't ask for one as I much prefer using my own MacBook (and they were only offering fairly low spec Windows ones)

Have to buy our own. Now have to buy our own printer ink too!

Certainly not common where I am. It would be considered bad practice for data security, for one thing.

That is terrible practice for all sorts of reasons. Just say you don't have one then they'll have to provide. Grants are always first go to but after departments should give all staff and PhD students laptops. They are easy to asset tag and track as in get it back when people leave.

Our department won’t buy them. If you haven’t got a grant to cover you have to use your own. Even students. It’s embarrassing tbh

Oh dear, these are not answers I wanted to hear ! Eye opening, I guess.

I do most of my purely academic work on my personal laptop but I'm in a weird position as I'm an honorary post doc and my substantive employer is the NHS. So I do have access to a secure departmental NHS laptop to take home and do my work on if I need to. I try very hard to avoid handling identifiable data at home though.

We are not officially allowed to use personal computers for university work. This is for security reasons.

We only have laptops now, no desktops. I believe the university policy is that everyone must be given a computer to use, it is departmental policy that this computer is a laptop.

Use my own as I need linux with root access and IT only allow low spec windows which they control. Might be possible to shift all my work to remote servers, but is useful to be able to work offline.

I have to buy computers for myself & all my PhD students etc from my grants. the university doesn't fund anything but will loan a grotty desktop to a student if they have no other options. So if I didn't have grants, I don't know what would happen. There are also pretty cautious data protection rules that I suspect are never enforced unless there were a breach, in which case the academic would get blamed.

are you a postdoc or otherwise paid on a grant? If so, the grant-holder should buy you a laptop. Data security might be your strongest argument to get a new one.

How does that work when you leave and you have loads of work stuff on your hard drive? Or when your pc breaks and you can't afford to replace it?

Those of you whose depts won't buy them go to your union and maybe ACAS. Point being employers have to give staff the tools to do their jobs otherwise they are being negligent. Someone in your depts is making this decision and they need to be stopped - I suspect they are power mad or misguided on how to save the pennies. I saw latter in dept I manage but managed to change the view at same time as just buying laptops for everyone. Just as well as 12 months later we were in lockdown !

Most universities haven't been audited by the ICO yet. Ours was a while back, and got an absolute bollocking from them. During the lockdown they had to buy every single person who handles student or staff data a laptop. As you can imagine this was quite a considerable outlay at a time when the pandemic was hitting finances hard. Quite a lesson for them to learn . . .

Once the ICO makes its way around the sector, staff using their own devices will be far less common.

I’ve been at my university for 30 years. I’ve always had computer supplied, first a desktop then laptops, replaced every 5 years. People have to buy Macs from grants if they want them but everyone gets a reasonable laptop supplied.

Same as some others - I'm in STEM, and computers in my Dept come only from grants. I've had some joint PhD students with schools who provide laptops for the students and staff members, and it's been eye-opening. Also embarrassing as for the one student registered in my Dept, and with me having no active grants, I had to scrape around for a few hundred quid to pay half a laptop (as the other supervisor offerred to cover the other half).

Well, I did have one grant but it was very specific and would only pay for a computer for the one staff member employed on it (it was something that I didn't make a budget for, it just came with a set amount of funds and very strong stipulations). I was finally able to argue that I needed a laptop for myself in order to review the work of the staff member - at that point I had a 7-year-old machine that couldn't run newer software, and was only on the University network because the operating system it had was so old it slid in underneath the security checks. I imagine it was a security nightmare. I was using my personal laptop at home to make lectures, as our lecture capture didn't operate on my machine. Although I still used it for email, etc. (just the oppposite you'd want for security, I think!)

For a while we also supplied laptops to our undergraduate students. We had tablets supplied during lockdown, as well as our laptops, for writing on in online classes. I don’t understand how people who are not supplied with a computer are meant to do their jobs, you should be provided with the means to carry out your duties.

My laptop is a University one and I would consider it bad practice to use a personal one for all the reasons listed above. I think it it very common though.

What I don’t have is the standard University specification, which isn’t fit for purpose for anyone. I think very few academics use the University standard spec ones. I had to go out and source money for a top end machine, unmanaged so I can still software etc.

I’d like to do that for my PDRAs/PhD students, but there are too many to do for everyone. The University has always provided a computer for PhD students, although even today the forms default to desktops!

I haven’t used anything other than my personal laptop for years. I have good intentions about being really careful with data - though in practice I’m sure I’m not careful enough about enforcing them. I should be more mindful of this. Work would get me a computer but it would be crappy - I want to use a Mac.

I had to buy my own laptop 5 years ago when I started. Uni provided me with a desktop in my office and said if I chose to wfh I had to provide my own computer.

they got me one in lockdown though.

We have desktop PCs in the office but I had to buy myself a laptop, headset, extra screen and document camera during lockdown. Also ergonomic office chair as sitting on my kitchen chairs all day caused all sorts of problems. No contribution from the university.
Then we were expected to return to the university for teaching but retain access to zoom, Teams etc. My desktop has no microphone as was installed pre Covid. I am now expected to bring my own equipment in from home to do my job in the office.
It's an outrage really that so many academic staff were left to finance their own equipment over lockdown. In what other sectors would that be acceptable?

This is madness! I got a laptop as soon as I got a permanent contract. And a headset and I'm sure I could get anything else that I needed (within reason) tech-wise to do my job.

How on earth can all of these unis get away with this? It's outrageous.

Although, my uni won't pay for my professional membership and it is required for the accreditation of our course. The only other member of staff that has the same professional membership is leaving and I haven't renewed mine. It's going to be an interesting stand off!