More than 10,000 pupils attend the five vocational schools in Wiesbaden. The courses cover metal and electrical engineering, nutrition and home economics, health, textile technology and social pedagogy, construction, wood, chemical and printing technology, personal hygiene and interior design as well as the commercial sector. A forerunner of the vocational school system is the evening and Sunday school founded in Wiesbaden in 1817, which still focused on general education subjects.

An important initiative for vocational education came from private associations. Craftsmen's associations offered courses in technical drawing and business arithmetic, particularly for the sons of master craftsmen. The Nassau Association for Natural History organized lectures, and from 1834 the Nassau Agricultural Association ran the Hof Geisberg Agricultural School.

The Nassau Trade Association, founded in 1843, opened a trade school on December 1, 1845 in the school on the market square, initially with 150 students, one of the first of its kind in Germany. The local trade association, founded in 1845, was put in charge of the school in 1848. In 1881, the town provided a building in Wellritzstraße. The construction of this trade school, which served its purpose for exactly 100 years, was mainly due to the drive of Christian Gaab, the long-time chairman of the Local Trade Association.

Founded in 1872, the Volksbildungsverein set up a further education school for girls in 1873, which it maintained until the municipal further education school was founded in 1901. The founding of the Biebrich Housekeeping School for daughters of its workers in 1889 was initiated by the Dyckerhoff & Söhne company.

In 1897, Wiesbaden made further education compulsory for young industrial workers. Since then, the trade school has offered two types of school side by side, the compulsory advanced training school and the voluntary trade school, which later developed into the Werkkunstschule. In the commercial sector, the gap in the public school system was initially filled by a commercial and trade school opened in 1852. At the request of the Kaufmännischer Verein, Lord Mayor Karl Bernhard von Ibell promulgated the local statute for the compulsory commercial training school on December 11, 1901. All "regular employees of both sexes in Wiesbaden commercial businesses who have not yet reached the age of 18" were obliged to attend. The school opened on 22.04.1902. The sponsors were the State of Prussia, Wiesbaden and the Chamber of Commerce. Lessons for pupils took place in the Lehrstraßen-Schule and at Schulberg, and for girls in the Höhere Mädchenschule at Schlossplatz, in the afternoons and evenings.

In 1920, under the leadership of Georg Kerschensteiner, a Reich Vocational School Act was drawn up and the less differentiated advanced training schools were converted into vocational schools geared towards the respective professions. Evening classes, which had previously been the norm, were changed to day classes. Vocational education courses were developed for teachers.

In 1921, the commercial training school was renamed "Städtische Handelslehranstalten". There were three departments: Commercial Vocational School, Commercial School and Higher Commercial School. Classes were mainly held at Dotzheimer Straße 9 (later the gray and red Elly Heuss School building). It was not until 1938 that the municipal commercial schools were able to move into their own building at Manteuffelstraße 12.

The women's technical school established in 1921, which was housed together with Lyceum II on Boseplatz, also included a housekeeping school, a nursery school and a vocational school for home economics. In 1930, the vocational school for home economics and the full-time home economics school were combined to form a separate school, which moved to Bleichstraße in 1932 (today the home of the business department of the University of Applied Sciences), and in 1939 the women's technical school was added.

In 1956, the trade school was initially divided. The Kerschensteinerschule was established on Welfenstraße as the first facility of the planned vocational school center. The vocational school with the vocational fields of construction, wood and printing technology, chemistry, physics, biology, personal hygiene, color technology and interior and media design was successively supplemented by the basic vocational training year, two-year vocational school, vocational postgraduate school, the technical college with the subjects of design, construction technology and chemical-physical technology, chemical technology and the painting school. In 1961, the commercial vocational school moved to Welfenstraße and was given the name Schulze-Delitzsch-Schule. It was later supplemented by the technical secondary school specializing in business and administration as well as business informatics, the technical school for business administration and the one- and two-year higher vocational school (office management and foreign language secretarial).

The Friedrich List School, which initially remained on Manteuffelstrasse with its business high school, business grammar school and vocational schools, also moved to Brunhildenstrasse in 1968. Today, the range of courses on offer includes the vocational grammar school specializing in business, data processing, chemical and electrical engineering, health and design and media technology, the two-year higher vocational school for information processing, the two-year vocational school for business and various commercial apprenticeships at the vocational school.

Gewerbeschule 1, which remained at Wellritzstraße, was given the name Friedrich-Ebert-Schule and offers the vocational fields of metal, electrical, information and event technology as well as various full-time school forms and further education courses. The school moved to the vocational school center in 1981.

The last of the five vocational schools to move to the Balthasar-Neumann-Straße vocational school center in 1988 was the home economics vocational school, known as the Louise-Schroeder-Schule since 1961. The vocational field of nutrition/housekeeping was supplemented by health, textile technology and clothing, social pedagogy and agriculture.