Onboarding Scenarios for Industries Beyond IT

There is a lot of onboarding content for IT companies. Much of the work, like code review, deployment and change requests, is easy to put into documents, and the people who build onboarding tools usually work in tech themselves. Onboarding in a semiconductor fab, on a construction site, or in a service organization with delivery routes and stores still leans heavily on thick manuals, classroom sessions and learning by watching a senior colleague.

First Run started as an onboarding RPG set in an IT company that builds web services. We recently added three maps on the same engine: the fab of Solmaru Semiconductor, a fictional chipmaker; an apartment construction site run by Firststone Construction, a fictional builder; and Hibarino Co-op, a fictional consumer co-operative in a Japanese regional town.

This article covers what we kept and what we changed when moving IT scenarios into other industries, and the rules for wrong answers that came out of that work. It is written for HR and L&D teams and field leaders thinking about onboarding scenarios for their own industry.

What stayed: the skeleton of the game

All four maps share the same engine and the same map layout. A new game starts by picking where you want to work, then a name, a role and a character. From there, every map works the same way.

There are five roles. In each role, the mentor hands out two quests and a colleague inside the building hands out one.
Every role also plays two shared tutorial quests, three quests from customers or stakeholders and two from the executive level. Each new map has 22 quests in total.
Answers are graded Excellent, Good, Risky or Poor, and every grade comes with the reasoning and a learning point.
Missed quests can be retried on the Review Board.
You start as an intern and rise to that industry's manager title.

The reason for keeping the skeleton is simple: the way people practice judgment does not change by industry. Read the situation, choose, hear why, retry what you missed. That loop works for a process engineer and for a delivery crew member alike. What needs to change is what sits on top of it.

The three new workplaces

Solmaru Semiconductor Fab

Your first day at a chip fab, in a bunny suit. The roles are Process Engineer, Equipment Engineer, Production Planning & Control, Quality & Yield Engineer and New Line Setup PM, and the goal is Line Manager. The main situations are SPC alarms, LOTO, hot lots and Q-time, yield drops and customer audits.

Riverside Block 1 Site

An apartment construction site where every day starts with the morning TBM (toolbox meeting). The roles are Construction Engineer, Contracts & Cost Engineer, MEP Engineer, Quality Control Engineer and Safety Manager, and the goal is Site Manager. The main situations are a rain forecast on pour day, pressure to pour before inspection sign-off, payment disputes, supervision findings and an owner who wants handover sooner.

Hibarino Co-op

A consumer co-operative funded by its members and run on one member, one vote. The roles are Home Delivery Crew, Center Operations, Store Staff, Product Buyer and Member Relations, and the goal is Center Manager. The main situations are a door that doesn't open, a cold-chain temperature excursion, a missing allergen label, membership sign-ups and a loss-making delivery route.

All three companies and their people are fictional. No real company's recipes, figures or customer names are used.

Four things we changed

1. The words of the field

Translating IT job titles and terms into another industry is not enough. The quests have to use the words a new hire actually hears in their first week. In the fab that means OOC, OCAP, MOC, LOTO, hot lot and Q-time. On the site it means TBM, pour, rebar inspection, progress claim and sleeve. In the co-op it means member, share capital, mimamori (the community watch on older members) and farm-direct produce.

Swapping jargon for plain words makes the game easier and the job harder, because the new hire has to learn the real terms again on day one. So we kept the unfamiliar terms and let the situation and the hint carry the meaning. The OOC quest's hint, for example, points out that a control limit signals the process is behaving differently.

2. Irreversible work

Every industry has work that cannot be undone, and that is where judgment practice matters most. In IT it is a deployment or a data deletion. Elsewhere it looks like this.

Semiconductor fab: moving a lot to the next step. Move it on after an alarm and the lots behind it carry the same problem.
Construction site: pouring concrete. Once the rebar is covered, nobody can inspect it again.
Co-op: product that has already gone out. Frozen food that sat too warm, or cookies with a missing egg allergen label, reach members' tables.

Many of the quests in the new maps sit just before these points. If you list an industry's irreversible tasks first, it quickly becomes clear where quests belong.

3. Non-negotiables

Frontline onboarding has standards that are not open to judgment: safety, the law, and promises made to members or customers. These are not what you practice. They are the floor you practice on.

That is why both tutorials in each new map deal with the floor. The fab opens with your first gowning and a gas alarm. The site opens with your first TBM and PPE, and an uncovered floor opening. The co-op opens with who owns the co-op and the personal data on a delivery route list. Showing the floor first means that later, however efficient an option looks, players know an answer that breaks through it cannot be right. Adding water to ready-mix on site or jumpering an interlock is graded Poor in any situation.

4. The voice of pressure

Judgment is hard less because people don't know the answer and more because someone is pushing for a different one. So the wrong answers in the new maps usually come in a voice you would actually hear at work.

"If I re-measure and it comes back in, can I just move the lot on?" A night-shift operator in the fab
"Let's pour now and sort the paperwork out later." A formwork foreman on site
"It's only five minutes." The foreman of a crew working at a slab edge without harnesses hooked on
"Just mention the first-month discount and get a signature today." A colleague at a co-op membership event

In the IT map, pressure came from client requests and deadlines. In the fab it comes from output targets and hot lots, on the site from the schedule and pour dates, and in the co-op from delivery efficiency and sign-up targets. Matching the source of pressure to the industry is what makes a situation card read as real to people who work there.

Designing wrong answers: "stop everything" isn't always right

There is a common trap when writing frontline onboarding scenarios for the first time. Safety and quality matter, so the right answer to every situation becomes "stop all work and report". Players learn the pattern fast: pick the most conservative option. That is not judgment practice.

The new maps in First Run grade over-reactions as Risky.

After a crane near-miss, shut down all work on site for a week, whatever the investigation finds: Risky
When rebar inspection finds a problem, cancel the whole day's pour and write up the reason tomorrow: Risky
Decline a customer's hot lot request on first-in, first-out principle: Risky
Ignore a head-office delivery efficiency target as a number from people who don't know the field: Risky

The Excellent answers mostly share one shape. Decide how much to stop, tell the right people right away, and open the way forward. In the inspection quest, the Excellent answer gets the flagged bay fixed and asks for re-inspection, pauses ready-mix dispatch, and agrees with the team lead and supervision whether to delay the whole pour or split it at an approved joint. It stops, but only as much as needed.

The gap between Good and Excellent

One more pattern kept showing up while we built the new maps. Answers graded Good are usually answers where the player dealt with a risk alone and moved on.

Put the cover back on an open floor opening yourself and carry on without reporting it: Good. The hazard is smaller, but nobody knows why the cover was moved.
Tell a neighbour asking for a member's phone number that it's personal information, and walk off: Good. The data is protected, but whatever the neighbour was worried about never reaches the center.
At a membership event, hand over a pamphlet and say to get in touch: Good. You avoided a hard sell, and also missed the chance to explain share capital and how to leave.

None of these are wrong. They just end on the spot. Excellent answers report so the cause gets fixed, or give the other person what they need to decide for themselves. Across all three industries, the first thing expected of a new hire was not to solve things alone but to report accurately.

Checklist for industry-specific onboarding scenarios

Do the quests use the words new hires hear in their first week?
Did you list the industry's irreversible tasks first?
Do the tutorials show the non-negotiables before anything else?
Are wrong answers written in the voice of real workplace pressure?
Are over-reactions graded Risky rather than correct?
Does each Excellent answer cover what to stop, who to tell and what comes next?
Does the feedback explain the gap between Good and Excellent?
Are real company figures, customer names and recipes kept out?
Is it clear the quests do not replace mandatory safety training or site SOPs?

Closing thoughts

The slowest part of moving into a new industry was not translating terms. It was working out which tasks there cannot be undone, who pushes and in what words, and what is expected of a new hire first. Once those three are clear, the situation cards come fairly quickly. If you want a custom version built from your own industry's scenarios, you can ask on the contact page.

Try workplace scenarios as onboarding quests

A new game lets you pick an IT company, a semiconductor fab, an apartment construction site or a co-op. Play the Onboarding