WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government needs to hire up to 193,000 employees in the next two years and will face a difficult task competing with the private sector for qualified employees, according to a report released by a nonprofit group on Tuesday

“We have a lot of work to do,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service. “This is a true war for talent.”

Budgetary constraints could also make it difficult for agencies to hire the employees they need, the group said.

“These are agencies’ projections about what they need to get their jobs done, so one would hope they’ll get the funding to accomplish that,” Stier said.

With around 480,000 federal employees expected to retire or resign in the next five years, the need for new federal workers is pressing, according to the report.

The survey of 34 federal agencies, covering almost 99 percent of the federal workforce, found that the government needs to add up to 193,000 “mission-critical” jobs through 2009.

Nearly 63,000 of those are positions related to security and law enforcement, and more than 83,000 are in agencies responsible for protecting the United States, such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

“We are engaged in a war on terror, and that war on terror requires feet on the ground,” Stier said.

But the need for talented workers isn’t just confined to the area of security.

The hiring projections spread across the industries, covering 2,400 job classifications, and hitting every state and nearly every country in the world. Eighty-five percent were outside of the Washington metropolitan area.

Not only will the government need to step up recruitment to fill entry-level positions, it will also need to increasingly look outside its own ranks and turn to current retirees to fill more senior posts.

“You cannot look at these hiring numbers and think that the government is going to succeed in its talent needs unless it sources very creatively,” Stier said. “Many folks retire with many, many useful years of work left in them.”