Newswise — BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University's Kelley School of Business has entered into a strategic partnership with CareerBuilder to create and develop comprehensive online solutions for corporate career training and development.

"This partnership represents a new model for meeting the education and training needs of corporations and their employees in Indiana and across the United States," said John F. Cady, executive director of Kelley Executive Partners, the school's executive education arm. "It combines the rich intellectual capital base of the Kelley School of Business with the expertise in human capital management of CareerBuilder to provide employees and employers with best-in-class training solutions."

The initial project for the partnership focuses on training solutions for the selling profession. Rosann Spiro, executive director of the Kelley School's Center for Global Sales Leadership and author of the best-selling text on sales management, underscored the importance of sales training.

"An estimated 50 percent of college graduates start their career in sales. Very few of these graduates have any sales training when they enter the workplace and, as a result, the majority fails during their first year on the job," Spiro said. "This poses an enormous cost on those employees and on their employers. This partnership is a way to begin to remedy that situation."

"Our experience with employers and job seekers clearly shows that sales professionals with formal sales training experience higher sales quota achievement, substantially lower turnover and high job placement regardless of the economic climate," said Brian Donahue, CareerBuilder's vice president of sales strategy. "For CareerBuilder, this partnership with the Kelley School represents an opportunity to teach critical skills and help support growth in businesses and the overall economy."

Working with CareerBuilder, Kelley Executive Partners has developed an online application that includes many learning modules to help students develop their sales competencies. It is embedded in technology that can be accessed instantly on tablets and mobile phones as well as personal computers.

It also can be used by sales organizations and managers to better understand the individual strengths and weaknesses of their team members, so they can help them be more effective.

The partnership draws upon the Kelley School's position as a leader in online business education, said Idalene Kesner, dean designate of the Kelley School.

"The Kelley School initiated the first online MBA program offered by a major business school in 1999. We have now provided online MBA degrees to thousands of students around the world," Kesner said. "This innovative partnership will underscore the Kelley School's leadership in online education and extend our ability to offer the highest quality education to a wider population."

About CareerBuilder

CareerBuilder is the global leader in human capital solutions, helping companies target and attract great talent. Its online career site, CareerBuilder.com, is the largest in the United States, with more than 24 million unique visitors, 1 million jobs and 50 million resumes. CareerBuilder works with the world's top employers, providing resources for everything from employment branding and talent and compensation intelligence to recruitment solutions. More than 10,000 websites, including 140 newspapers and broadband portals such as MSN and AOL, feature CareerBuilder's proprietary job search technology on their career sites. Owned by Gannett Co. Inc. (NYSE:GCI), Tribune Company and The McClatchy Company (NYSE:MNI), CareerBuilder and its subsidiaries operate in the United States, Europe, South America, Canada and Asia.