Background <p>Professional title promotion is a critical pathway for clinical nurses’ career development in China, yet nursing managers observe substantial heterogeneity in nurses’ self-management behaviors during the promotion process. Clarifying how managers perceive these differences is important for designing targeted strategies to support clinical nurses’ professional title promotion.</p> Methods <p>A purposive sampling method was employed to select 15 frontline clinical nursing managers for semi-structured interviews regarding their observations and perceptions of staff nurses’ self-management in professional title promotion. Data were analyzed using Colaizzi’s seven-step method for qualitative analysis. Based on Benner’s theoretical framework and interview content, key self-management characteristics of clinical nurses in professional title promotion were extracted, and a profile model was constructed. Visualization was achieved through word clouds and tables.</p> Results <p>Five core characteristics were identified in nursing managers’ descriptions of clinical nurses’ self-management: personal traits, career awareness, educational background, professional experience, and sociocultural influences. Four perceived self-management profiles of clinical nurses were categorized: aggressive, potential-mining, stable-conservative, and laissez-faire.</p> Conclusion <p>Based on interviews with 15 nursing managers from three tertiary hospitals in Jiangsu Province, we identified four perceived self-management profiles of clinical nurses in professional title promotion across five key dimensions. These findings, which reflect nursing managers’ observations rather than clinical nurses’ self-reported experiences, suggest that tailoring managerial support and development interventions to these perceived profiles may help support clinical nurses’ career advancement in similar hospital contexts; however, further research is needed to examine the transferability of these profiles to other regions and to nurses’ own accounts. Given the hierarchical nature of hospital nursing, these manager-derived personas may also reflect organizational expectations and power dynamics; future studies should triangulate managers’ views with nurses’ own accounts and other data sources.</p> Clinical trial number <p>Not applicable.</p>