For college students, the internship can be one of the most difficult and most rewarding parts of the whole affair. It can help a young student build invaluable contacts, or it can be a hair-raising experience for minimum wage that teaches virtually nothing and has no application in the future. But this widely diverse array of responses is scarcely lost to Chegg, the Student Hub, who recently acquired Internships.com in a bid to shore up this massive yet often disorganized market.

Chegg reportedly landed Internships.com, formerly a division of CareerArc Group LLC, for a combination of $1 million in shares of Chegg common stock and $10 million in outright cash. With the acquisition of Internships.com, Chegg lands a hefty purse of resources in exchange for its investment. Reports suggest that Internships.com came with two million registered students, connections to 380 different universities, and a complete listing of 90,000 internships from 60,000 companies, all of which are now part of the Chegg Career Center.

The Chegg Career Center focuses on providing both information and available listings for students looking to explore careers and, in turn, build marketable skill sets that can be more readily offered to companies. This is done via finding both internships and entry-level positions, positions that better allow students to build said skills, and the Chegg Career Center offers clear information on the skills needed to obtain one of these positions.

Internships are growing increasingly important for college students looking for work; indeed, not only do 82 percent of hiring managers in a recent Harris Interactive (News - Alert) poll believe that prior internships are important for recent graduates to have, 65 percent of employers in a National Association of Colleges and Employers survey revealed that full-time offers did go to interns, though in what proportion was, as yet, unclear.

Chegg's chairman and CEO, Dan Rosensweig, offered up some comment around the acquisition, saying “With this acquisition, Chegg is poised to disrupt the highly inefficient and fragmented $5 billion college recruiting market. Closing the skills gap and finding students career opportunities is critical for improving student outcomes in a global economy. Adding Internships.com enables Chegg to fundamentally improve matching between students and employers, helping businesses to better identify the best candidates and students to develop the real world job skills they'll need upon graduation.”

Experience is often key toward landing jobs, particularly in a market where job seekers commonly outpace available positions. It's on par with networking as an important point in job hunting, and it's becoming such that who you know is only slightly more important than what you know and what you can do. While some might ultimately question the value of the internship—yes, offers are made, but in how many cases?—there's little doubt that having job experience on a resume, particularly for new grads, is going to be a huge step toward finding the first job right out of college.

It will be interesting to see just what kind of impact the Chegg Career Center has on the wider market, particularly in terms of how many students find work. While an internship may not produce that dream job offer right away, it certainly improves the chances of establishing the pathway to that dream job down the line.