CHICAGO, June 14 (UPI) -- U.S. employment firm CareerBuilder said it had discovered that formal training in sales was disproportionately missing from the world of higher education.

Data from Economic Modeling Specialists, a CareerBuilder company, showed there were 599 colleges and universities in the country offering degrees in geology and only 274 offering degrees in sales.

In an even more pronounced contrast, there are 1,571 schools of higher education offering degrees in psychology, about six times more than there are school offering degrees in sales.

However, there are 15,517,185 sales positions in the United States -- give or take a few.

At the same time there are 167,728 jobs related to psychology and 94,696 related to geology, making for opportunity ratios of 93:1 and 164:1, in psychology and geology, respectively.

"In the last year alone, there were 678,968 job openings in sales-related fields compared to 8,698 jobs in psychology-related fields and 6,766 job openings in geology-related fields," CareerBuilder said.

A recent Harris Interactive survey found that one sixth of the sales managers in companies that missed their revenue projections for the year indicated that lack of training in sales was a contributing factor.

In the survey, 35 percent of the business managers indicated that their company missed their revenue projections for the year, CareerBuilder said.

The survey included responses from 2,184 hiring managers and human resource personnel and was conducted between Feb. 11 and March 6.

The results of the survey include a margin of error of plus and minus 2.1 percentage points, it can be said with 95 percent certainty, CareerBuilder said.